The American Way vs. The Russian Way

Yesterday, I went to NASA Ames Research Center for a live television viewing of STS-132 , the final planned flight of space shuttle Atlantis (local news video here). A more beautiful launch I can't remember - and Ames' giant projection screen and powerful sound system certainly enhanced the experience.

Astronaut Karol J. "Bo" Bobko, himself a former Space Shuttle Commander and veteran of three space flights, explained checklist events leading up to liftoff. As is customary during shuttle launch events at Ames, an expert speaker addressed the gathering crowd prior to coming out of the nine minute hold. This time it was Ken Souza, a former director of space biology programs at Ames.

Ken showed slides on the history of biological space research at Ames, including involvement in the biological films experiment being launched 0n STS-132. He explained the science behind the experiment, much of which probably went over the heads of most of the audience.

But then he showed a slide that almost knocked me over in my seat. I wish I had a copy of it for this blog, but there is plenty of other information to allow me to reconstruct its contents for you. The slide depicted the history of certain biological research capsules launched into space. With the exception of three (Biosphere I, II, and III) the biological research spacecraft are all Russian.

And they are all based on the Vostok Spacecraft. And they are still flying.

Think about that: a modern spacecraft that looks almost exactly like the original Vostok that took Yuri Gargarin into space in 1961, ushering in the era of human spaceflight, and still in use!

Let's examine the progression of the Soviet/Russian biological research spacecraft over the last 80 years. That's not a typo -- we're going to start in the 1930's.

Here are two example feats in the history of spaceflight:

September 30, 1933 -- Russian balloon "USSR-1" reached 60,695 feet, but ascent never became an official record; crewed by Georgi Prokivief, Ernest Birnbaum, and Konstantine Godrenow. (USSR)

January 30, 1934 -- Russian balloon "Osaviakhim" reached 73,000 feet, but crew died when gondola fell free; crewed by Paul F. Fedoseyenko, Andrei B. Wasienko (or, Vasenko), and Ilya Usyskin. (USSR)

You can read a fair treatment of USSR-1 here. What's notable, in terms of Russian spacecraft design, is the gondola. You can see it in the postage stamp below (the spherical object below the balloon).

Note also that there were crews of three in the gondolas. And while the gondola was significantly larger than the spacecraft yet to come, the shape , manufacturing/assembly practices, and test methodology are similar to way things were done for spacecraft much later.



Experimentation with pressure vessels continued in the next decades. Sergei Korolev sent pressurized packages containing dogs and other animals in pods attached to the side of the Russian version of the German V-2 (the R-1, as seen below) in the late 1940's. These were suborbital flights.

With the advent of the R-7 in 1955, payloads were devised to achieve earth orbit. Satellites devised for biological payloads (animal or human) would require the requisite life support subsystems, dictating the size and weight constraints. Sputnik 2 carried the dog "Laika" and required a payload capsule no larger than that for Sputnik 1. Here's a nice overview of Laika and the animal Cold Warriors who paved the way for humans in space.

For human payloads, however, a larger capsule was required. Enter the Vostok, an austere yet functional and producible human spacecraft.

Originally designed for unmanned photographic reconnaissance, the design was adapted to sustain a single cosmonaut on multi-orbit missions around the earth.

The designed proved adaptable to just about anything the Soviets decided to do with it: human spaceflight, unmanned instrumented earth satellite, materials processing experiments, earth resources sensing, and biological specimen research. The Vostok design lent itself to these and other applications, and the Soviets took full advantage of it.

The spherical reentry module enabled the return of the payload safely to the surface. It was pressurized and could sustain living specimens until recovery. It was compact. It benefited from common facilities and tooling that has become a hallmark of Russian engineering. It was robust.

And now we come to a variant of the Vostok which is still in use to this day. It's called Bion, and it has flown specimens to space and back since 1973, roughly every two years. The research conducted has added immensely to the body of knowledge for space medicine and other fields of biology. (You can order a great book about the Bion here.)


This brings us back to the original premise of this post, which was a discussion by Ken Souza regarding biological space research. I spoke to Ken after the shuttle launch and asked him about the significance of the Bion spacecraft. He told me that without the Bion, the United States could not have conducted much of the long term exposure experiments on biological specimens over the last 40 years.

How profound is that! We think of the United States as a leader in all spaceflight, much less human spaceflight, yet a former NASA director indicates that without a Russian spacecraft, our understanding of the effects of the space environment on many different types of life, from microbes to primates, would be unknown today.

Why is this so? While the United States has maintained a human presence in space over the last 50 years, research in the field of life sciences always faces budgetary and policy obstacles.

After the three Biosphere flights between 1966 and 1969, US biological space research was confined largely to experiments on Skylab (1973-1974), two-week space shuttle flights (1983-2000) and the ISS (2000- present). You can see the historical extent of animal biological space research here.

The ISS was looked upon as a boon to biological research at its inception. After the Columbia disaster in 2003, and the redirection of the Space Program towards exploration of the moon, Mars and beyond, emphasis on basic research was diminished. This is ironic, given that the primary goal of Constellation was to send astronauts on longer and longer missions into deep space.

Well, if you can't figure out how to keep an astronaut healthy in deep space, you can't leave him on the moon for extended periods of time. You can't send him to Mars. He will die of radiation related illness. Proper shielding is necessary, of course. But might it also be useful to know the limits of exposure, and if there is a potential medical solution?

Do you think that a medical solution that prevents an astronaut from getting cancer on the long trip to and from Mars would be beneficial to the rest of us here on earth?

That's what it's all about. I can't think of a better spin-off from the Space Program than a cure for cancer. But you can't fathom it without sustained basic research, peer reviewed by the international scientific community. And you get that research by sending biological specimens into the space environment and studying the associated effects. You do this so that future human spacefarers can be suitably protected and can conduct their missions successfully, and live to tell about it.

There are three new Bion-M missions coming up soon, starting in 2012. The venerable Vostok still has life - well into the 21st Century. That's the Russian way of spacecraft design. If a design is useful and robust, don't throw it away in favor of a completely new system. That is not the way of spacecraft design in the United States. The replacement of proven space systems with dissimilar innovations may spark revolutions in design, but at significant cost and, as in the case of the Saturn V, significant loss of sustained progress.

The Bion is but one example of the Russians' philosophy of continuous refinement of spacecraft. We will discuss others in future posts. For now, let's hope that the new direction of the U.S. Space Program utilizes the ISS to the fullest extent possible for biological space research. It will help us all, in the end.

Who killed the moon program?

Do you believe that President Obama has effectively shut down the space program and stopped the United States' return to the moon?

You may change your mind or at least have a more tempered opinion after you read what follows: our first in a series on the tortured history of U.S. attempts to restart exploration of deep space.

We first delve into the way it was, the program of record, circa 1964. Flip through this iconic issue of Life Magazine to get a feel for the vigor of the time.

A more robust time in the U.S. Space Program has never existed. This was the age of the Creation of the Space Infrastructure! Everything was being built -- Kennedy Space Center; the massive test stands for the rockets engines that would take us to the moon; the human spaceflight training facilities, including voluminous water tanks for full-scale Extravehicular Activity practice sessions. And of course, scientific and engineering firms and universities around the country were immersed in the task of getting a man on the moon.

A more robust system for space travel has not since been devised! The lunar transportation infrastructure may have been the response to a crash course in how to get to the moon, but the systems within that infrastructure had a multitude of spin-off application possibilities - and plans were produced for many practical, feasible continuation projects using the same lunar module, command/service module and Saturn V booster. What were the limits of such plans? They were surprisingly ambitious, by today's standards. For instance, a manned Mars mission was planned for 1975. All with the same infrastructure.

Economies of scale would kick in at some point. When, and to what extent, are subect to conjecture. We have found, with five decades of space exploration plans behind us, that any cost projection we make today will be different (and not cheaper!) tomorrow. I don't think anyone can claim that increasing the number of Saturn V's per year would bring down cost to the levels we see with an Atlas V or Delta IV.

But the capabilty may have proven to be worthwhile. It's a capability no one on earth has today. No single heavy lift booster in use today even approaches the low earth orbit payload capacity of the Saturn V.

Even if Ares V (the proposed Saturn V-class booster in the the current program of record, Project Constellation) was funded and produced, the first launch would likely miss the 2025 timeframe. That would be 50 years after the world lost the Saturn V. And what could we have done with such a machine over those decades....

So what happened? Where did all the possibilities go? Who really killed the moon program?

To begin with, let's look at the historical appropriations for NASA since its inception. Here's a graph that we will refer to from time to time:




You can see that the highest level of NASA funding occurred in 1964-1966 -- and that reflects the construction of the gargantuan lunar spaceflight infrastructure.

The steep downward slope that followed would result in the cancellation of three advanced Apollo lunar landings, beginning with the cancellation of Apollo 20 on January 4, 1970. Reshuffling of mission priorities as a reaction to the decimated budget also resulted in the cancellation of Skylab 2, which would have been the second giant U.S. space station. (The actual hardware sits near the main entrance of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum today, and you can walk through it.)

Soon after President Richard M. Nixon took office, he appointed a Space Task Group, to be headed by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. From NASA's history of the planning for a post-Apollo Space Program:

Besides being economy minded, the new administration was in no hurry to establish a position on space. Early in 1969 the new President appointed a Space Task Group to study the space program, calling for a report in six months on alternatives for the post-Apollo period. Predictably, the group's report, submitted on September 15, recommended a balanced program of manned and unmanned space activity. Its most radical suggestion was that NASA should adopt a new long-range goal, comparable to the Apollo goal that had sustained space exploration for eight years, to provide the impetus for new developments. For that goal they suggested manned exploration of the planets, specifically a manned landing on Mars by the end of the 20th century. Three options were proposed: an all-out effort, including a 50-man earth-orbiting space station and a lunar base, culminating with the Mars landing in the mid-1980s; a less ambitious program providing for evaluation of an unmanned Mars landing before setting a date for the manned mission; and a minimum program that would develop a space station and a shuttle vehicle but would defer the Mars landing to some unspecified time before the end of the century. Costs were estimated at between $8 billion and $10 billion per year by 1980 for the most ambitious option and from $4 billion to $5.7 billion annually by 1976 for the least.

You can read the Space Task Group's final report here in its entirity. We will explore this report in great detail in future posts.

Of the three major options presented, President Nixon gravitated toward the most minimal: the space station with an accompanying shuttle vehicle. With his final decision, he elilminated the space station. All that was left was the shuttle vehicle. Destination: low earth orbit.

Ten days after the decision to cut Apollo 20, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine announced a stop in Saturn V production, effectively ending the heavy launch capability the U.S. had built. The atmosphere in the country would not enable a continuation. A congressional historian of that era wrote:

By hindsight, it seems unlikely that even the strongest and most adept mobilization of the supporters of more manned flights to the Moon could have successfully overcome the adverse feeling in the country in the early 1970's. Congress and the Nation could be persuaded to support Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and a modest level of activity by NASA in many other areas. But . . . Von Braun's dream of a manned flight to Mars was not in the cards for the 20th century, at least.

So, who killed the moon program? If you must attach the name of a U.S. president, the answer is obvious. 'Twas Nixon. Who killed the Saturn V, the most powerful - and successful - space booster in history? 'Twas Nixon. And we have never been able to rejuvenate the lunar transportation infrastructure since.

Here's a taste of what you and I have missed all these years, courtesy of the fantastic blog, Beyond Apollo: wonderful projects that were largely ready to get started, and were going to take advantage of that enormous space infrastructure. These are not pie-in-the-sky concepts. Rather, they are serious proposals that were either in-work, or on the table for immediate consideration, when the carpet was pulled out from underneath the Space Program.

Peruse the long list of lost projects as you see fit, and be advised: there is much, much more. With a robust infrastructure, there are many possibilities.

The program of record, Constellation, was not on track to meet its objectives within a reasonable timeframe. We will discuss this at length, soon. And far from "Apollo on Steroids", its performance against its stated requirements was marginal, and had little room for growth, mainly due to booster limitations. Not so with the former Apollo infrastructure.

We (and I do mean "we" this time, as in "you and I here today") are trying to get it back. It is not a simple matter of having "been there, done that". We have lost our infrastructure, and we are working to scrap and scrape together some semblance of that great future Space Program, that we lost so long ago.

And you and your children can help. All we have to do, together, is learn about the Space Program, and support it in some way. We will discuss the various means of contribution in future posts.

An intriguing "what-if"....

Continuing with our construction of the
Space Program's foundation, we will now explore a tantalizing question: what if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated?

The world would be a different place today, to be sure. But how different and the details of that difference, amount to pure speculation.

In the area of the Space Program, however, some evidence exists that Kennedy was open to adjustments to the path on which he had placed Project Apollo.

Dr. Dwayne Day wrote a piece on the subject some years ago. Apparently, there is a tape at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum of a meeting with James Webb that took place shortly before Kennedy's September 1963 address to the United Nations. The tape is inaccessible due to restrictions placed by the library. You can tell from his article that Dr. Day was frustrated by his inability to convince the library to grant him access to the tape. If you concede that presidents generally consult with their cabinet members, appointees and advisors before they publicly speak on a topic, then there is reason to believe the Webb meeting contains the basis and the thought processes that led to Kennedy's UN speech.

Why would the tape prove illuminating? From the available documentary evidence, Kennedy appears to look for options to the program of record. The UN speech is the most substantial indicator. And for the first time, we see a retrenchment on the unilateral nature of Project Apollo:

Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.

The available documentation trail is insufficient to conclusively determine how the Space Program would have been altered, had Kennedy not be killed two months later. As we know from the November 1962 meeting with Webb, Kennedy was concerned about the growning cost of the effort to put a man on the moon.

In late 1963, there was still no hard evidence that the Soviet Union was pursuing their own moon program. Without a strong sense of competition with the Soviets, it was going to be more and more difficult for Kennedy to justify funding Apollo at its current rate. Pretty soon, maybe in 1964, Congress would balk and begin to demand a decrease in Apollo expenditures. Perhaps to save face, or to create an alternative that could be ready to implement should the funding not arrive, Kennedy considered partnering with the Soviets for the moon.

A month before the UN speech, he spoke to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin about cooperation in space. There are no quotes available from that exchange, but the fact that Kennedy engaged the Soviets on the option would indicate this might be a continued pursuit in the years to come.

It was not to be. After Kennedy's assassination, the Space Program galvanized and strode forward toward the moon, without international cooperation.

An observation put for by G. Ryan Faith in his recent summary of the Obama space plan (part 1, part 2) begs us to consider the different means of government motivation to continue, and finish, complex space projects. Mr. Faith describes the psychology of competition as it relates to the Space Program:

We have seen, at least during the Cold War, that competition can generate stronger support for space programs than the programs would otherwise normally enjoy, primarily because the existence of a competing space program provides an external confirmation of the value and validity of one’s own national space exploration program. Without some sort of external validation of the value of a space program, it becomes easier for skeptics to regard space exploration as something on par with a national quest to have the world’s largest ball of twine: a rather expensive and quite pointless exercise in gaining dominance in a field in which there is neither demand nor interest.

When faced with a lack of external validation through competition, there is an alternative:

If one does not have the ability to generate intense competition to support a national space program, the natural counterpart to competition—cooperation—becomes the next best alternative. International cooperation can validate a national space exploration effort, because cooperation implies some measure of international respect and recognition of the importance of one’s own efforts. Even if this validation is not sufficient in and of itself, the risk of being seen as having abandoned one’s own allies in their space exploration efforts makes cancellation of joint programs less attractive.

Therefore, it may be safe to surmise that if Kennedy had lived, and if Project Apollo had begun to experience financial jeopardy, then the international path might have ultimately saved the program and enabled man to walk on the moon. If that were the case, the first steps on the moon may have been simultaneously by both an astronaut and a cosmonaut. How might that have changed the shape of history...the speculation is endless - and largely pointless, except for potential lessons that might be gleaned from the exercise.

The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), announced in 1972 and flown in 1975, was the first large-scale occurrence of American-Soviet cooperation in Space. It would be almost twenty years later before the partnership continued, during the Shuttle-Mir program in the 1990's.

Kennedy's words at the UN in 1963 resonate today, although as an undercurrent. The International Space Station is functional and mostly complete because the program shifted from a unilateral project (under President Reagan it was called "Space Station Freedom") to a multinational project under President Clinton. Practically dead in the early 1990's, the project was salvaged only with the inclusion of international partners. And it was completed to its present state largely due to the inherent pressure by the international community on the US not to back out.

We will explore the true value and great potential of the ISS in future posts.

For now, let us remember that if we can't explore space alone, we can always explore it with international partners. That could be the difference between getting it done, or not even getting close to finish line.

“…I’m not that interested in space.”

Shocking though it may seem, these words were uttered by President John F. Kennedy at a November 1962 meeting with NASA Administrator James Webb and other staff members.

As we lay the foundation for how the Space Program arrived at its present state, it is important to delve deeper into its origins. You will find that although the truth of the matter is often readily available, it gets hidden by the truncation of information.

It also gets hidden because the truth sometimes takes away from legend, and in this case, the legend of John F. Kennedy as the champion of space, and the visionary behind the Space Program.

As much as I admire President Kennedy, I feel that we have been allowed to vault certain statements he made in a couple of speeches to disproportionate levels. The statements we are most familiar with are these:

1. Announcement of the plan to land a man on the moon by 1970
2. Explaining why we choose to go to the moon

Now, we have seen and heard these clips for decades, and from the public's standpoint, this had become all that is necessary to know about JFK's motivations for the Space Program. Alas, by whittling the context down to these two sound bites, a great deal of information is lost. Information that explains the status of the space program then, as well as now.

Let's start with the expansion of the first clip to its full form -- the Address to a Special Joint Assembly of the Congress on May 25, 1961.

Kennedy had many more issues on the plate besides the Space Program, and yet the Space Program was overtly shown to be integral to the overall strategy of winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and to a lesser degree, China. Only after describing many other spending proposals, including an increase in propaganda in places like Central and South America, does he arrive at the ninth segment of the speech, entitled "Space".

To view the speech in its entirity is to unveil a more complete picture of the concerns of the time, and to place the Space Program into a context in which it started, and has never left. It has been, and always will be, a vehicle for national preëminence.

Here is the paragraph which sets forth the new lunar objective:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations—explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

Immediately following the declaration of the goal of a manned lunar landing, he proceeds with this startling proposal:

Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.

Those of us who have often pondered the possibility of travelling through the solar system at 3 times the speed of today's rockets lament the lack of progress in the area of space propulsion. How different would our capability be if we had such propulsion -- for the last 4 decades?

Now, to the Rice University speech of the fall of 1962. You can watch the entire speech here. We are accustomed to seeing a very small piece of this speech, which begins with tumultuous applause and rousing shouts, as Kennedy begins, "We choose to go to the moon...."

If you watch the entire speech, you will note that the familiar applause is a result of a joke Kennedy made ending a series of questions on why man does what he does ("Why does Rice play Texas?"), so it is lost on those who are only familiar with the short version that the applause is not for the statement that "we choose to go to the moon".

That being said, that day at Rice University, the full energy of the emergent Space Program was in view. Only 19 months since the announcement of the lunar landing goal, we have Kennedy at the podium, Vice President Lyndon Johnson sitting behind him, and a host of spectators in the football stadium. The heat has many of them wiping their faces - repeatedly - during the course of the President's talk. But the speech is rich with the enthusiasm we often hear attributed to Kennedy regarding the Space Program.

Please listen to the whole thing, especially if you have doubts as to the public zest for space in the early 1960's.

In private, the attitude was muted considerably. Let's turn now to the closed meeting mentioned at the beginning of this post. As a manager at an aerospace firm, I recognize the need for hard discussions about budget, and justficiation for expenditures. And this is exactly what we are listening to here and here, as James Webb and JFK converse about a request for an additional $400 million to mitigate a potential slip in Apollo's schedule.

But this is where the real motives behind Project Apollo are laid bare. While they were always out in the open (for those who heard all the words in the speeches above), in this audio recording (the button was pushed by Kennedy himself), we have no doubt that the only reason Apollo existed was to beat the Soviet Union in a "test of the system".

And here it is, on the 17th page of the transcript:

President Kennedy: Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.

James Webb: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space, which are your own....

President Kennedy: Because, by God, we keep, we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the number of the Soviet Union...we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody tells me that we’re the number one in the world. And what is it? I can’t think what it is.

Interruption from multiple unknown speakers: The linear accelerator.

President Kennedy: I’m sorry, that’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it!

James Webb: Let me say it slightly different. The advanced Saturn is eighty-five times as powerful as the Atlas. Now we are building a tremendous giant rocket with an index number of eighty-five if you give me Atlas one. Now, the Russians have had a booster that’ll lift fourteen thousand pounds into orbit. They’ve been very efficient and capable in it. The kinds of things I’m talking about that give you preeminence in space are what permits you to make either that Russian booster or the advanced Saturn better than any other. A range of progress possible it is so much different [unknown].

President Kennedy: The only.... We’re not going to settle the four hundred million this morning. I want to take a look closely at what Dave Bell.... But I do think we ought get it, you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.

I pass by the Stanford Linear Accelerator every few weeks if I'm driving down I-280. I wonder how many people today know anything about it....