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  "Original" ASTP Mission

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Author Topic:   "Original" ASTP Mission
Tom
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From: New York
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posted 05-20-2007 11:08 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Tom   Click Here to Email Tom     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Does anyone here have any information on the original plans for the Apollo Soyuz mission, in which Apollo was to dock with the Salyut 4/Soyuz combination?

Also, was it a joint decision not to include the Salyut 4 station in the docking plans?

tfrielin
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From: Athens, GA
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posted 05-21-2007 07:37 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for tfrielin     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I'm not sure I can answer what the "original" ASTP plan was re a Salyut 4 docking. I vaguely remember that it was NASA's preference to do that, but apparently the Soviets didn't want to grant us that much access to Salyut. Was Salyut 4 one of the military Salyuts? Can't remember.

But there were numerous other proposals to use the left-over Apollo/Saturn/Skylab hardware to do an "International Skylab" mission and an ASTP/Skylab mission.

The International Skylab was proposed for launch in 1976 as part of the Nation's Bicentennial celebrations and would have hosted two Soyuz missions to the Backup Skylab (Skylab B)

The ASTP/Skylab plan had two options: Skylab B would be launched in January 1975 and the ASTP mission would be launched according to schedule on July 15. The ASTP CSM would perform the joint operations with Soyuz, then the CSM would rendezvous with Skylab B for a 56--90 day extended mission.

Option Two would have added an April 1975 launch where the crew would spend 56 days on the Skylab, then host the ASTP extended mission as in Option One.

All this is discussed in my article from about ten years ago in Quest magazine and I can supply you with a copy if you're interested:

"Skylab B: Unflown Missions, Lost Opportunities." Quest, volume 5, number 4, 1996, p.12-21

Blackarrow
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From: Belfast, United Kingdom
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posted 05-21-2007 04:59 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Blackarrow     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I certainly remember reading news reports that the original plan (or one of them) was for the Apollo to dock with a Salyut. I was quite disappointed when the "final version" became a docking between an Apollo and a Soyuz, mainly because I had wanted to see lots of close-up photos of a Salyut in orbit. Of course, that's probably what the Soviets were concerned about!

Tom
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From: New York
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posted 05-21-2007 05:46 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Tom   Click Here to Email Tom     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Salyut 4 was not a military version... Salyuts 3 and 5 were.

Rusty B
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posted 07-20-2007 02:48 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Rusty B   Click Here to Email Rusty B     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
North American Rockwell did a 1971 study for NASA about docking an Apollo CSM to a Soyuz/Salyut.

The 341 page report is available free online as a PDF format document: International Rendezvous and Docking Mission - December 1971.

KSCartist
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posted 07-20-2007 06:32 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for KSCartist   Click Here to Email KSCartist     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Was the plan for the "International Skylab" mission using the backup workshop because of the orbital inclination?

I ask the question because the first workshop was still in a stable orbit in 1975 and 1976 time frame.

tfrielin
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From: Athens, GA
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posted 07-26-2007 09:22 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for tfrielin     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The International Skylab plans were to use the Backup Skylab even though the first Skylab was still in orbit.

It had nothing to do with the orbital inclination -- Skylab and ASTP were both launched into 56 degree inclination orbits, as would have the backup Skylab, had it been launched. To rendezvous with any Soyuz, you had to have such a high inclination orbit as the Russians can't go much lower an inclination because they are so far north.

Remember there were lots of end-of-life problems with Skylab -- it was low on TACS gas, the control movement gyros were all pretty much shot, etc., so NASA wanted to launch the Backup Skylab for hosting the Russians.

With NASA's constrained budget in the mid-'70s though it never happened and, as a result, we can all walk through the least travelled, but most visited space station ever -- at the National Air and Space Museum.

KSCartist
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posted 07-26-2007 09:46 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for KSCartist   Click Here to Email KSCartist     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
You never know what you'll learn on cS.

I wasn't aware of the problem with the TACS gas and the gyros. But since you provided that information it begs the question...

Why was there plans in the late 70's to have a shuttle rendezvous and dock with the workshop and attach a boost motor? Were they hoping to repair the gyros and generally bring the lab up to living conditions?

tfrielin
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From: Athens, GA
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posted 07-26-2007 10:29 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for tfrielin     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by KSCartist:
Why was there plans in the late 70's to have a shuttle rendezvous and dock with the workshop and attach a boost motor? Were they hoping to repair the gyros and generally bring the lab up to living conditions?
Dwayne Day recently sent me a huge pdf file -- a study on reusing the original Skylab. It assumed that the Shuttle would be operational by 1979 and it was very detailed as to what all they needed to do to bring Skylab back into habitable shape. It would have been an interesting exercise if they had been able to try it. But the Shuttle delays doomed Skylab and it reentered before the Shuttle had a chance to try a rehab.

kr4mula
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From: Cinci, OH
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posted 07-26-2007 12:32 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for kr4mula   Click Here to Email kr4mula     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I remember one of the NASA guys we interviewed for the JSC Oral History Project (it may have been Bob Thompson, but don't quote me on that) mentioned to me in casual conversation that Marshall deliberately designed Skylab with a control system (and other components) that had a finite lifetime and couldn't be easily recharged or refurbished, despite the fact that it would've been about as easy and not much more expensive to make them serviceable.

He said they did this so as not to have Skylab sabotage plans envisioned for a "real" space station to be built after the shuttle was flying. A still-operational Skylab would be a political liability in getting funds approved for a bigger, more capable station.

At the time, his comments had distinct echoes of what was going on in the Mir deorbit debates. I always meant to check out these assertions, but never got around to it.

Anyone else familiar with this theory?

E2M Lem Man
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posted 07-26-2007 01:54 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for E2M Lem Man   Click Here to Email E2M Lem Man     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
A 1973 report to the House on space and technology issues there portions relating to the American and Russian rendezvous and docking mission with a Salyut and the saving of Skylab and plans to extend its mission AND add a Earth Observation Module amongst others.

And their were designs for the backup Skylab to be reconfigured or to even dock to Skylab a to create an even larger MEGA-SKYLAB!

tfrielin
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From: Athens, GA
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posted 07-26-2007 02:11 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for tfrielin     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by kr4mula:
...Marshall deliberately designed Skylab with a control system (and other components) that had a finite lifetime and couldn't be easily recharged or refurbished, despite the fact that it would've been about as easy and not much more expensive to make them serviceable.
It certainly rings true -- NASA is an engineer dominated culture and an engineering maxim is, "if it works, it's obsolete". So reusing Skylab as opposed to engineering a new, modular Shuttle-era station had much more appeal than rehabbing Skylab.

But you've got to wonder if NASA had known it would take them about twenty five more years to get that follow-on space Station (and even longer than that to finish it) would they have been so eager to turn up their institutional nose at Skylab?

John Charles
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posted 07-26-2007 04:11 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for John Charles     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Long ago, I had heard a variant of the same story, except it had Congress mandating that Skylab not be refuelable, etc., to keep NASA from converting it into a permanent space station.

However, I do not have any evidence for this, and rumors like those we are discussing in this thread, while titillating, may be only distant relatives of the truth. I hope someone can find evidence in some archive to confirm or refute these rumors.

Dwayne Day
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posted 07-26-2007 05:01 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Dwayne Day   Click Here to Email Dwayne Day     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I actually doubt it. This sounds apocryphal to me. I suspect that if you dig deeply in this, you'd learn that the mods to make it reusable were considered expensive and unnecessary.

tfrielin
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From: Athens, GA
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posted 07-27-2007 07:51 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for tfrielin     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I think NASA's mind set at this time was, in the best of all possible worlds, to produce and launch a series of Skylabs, not to produce just one that could be replenished, thus making it quasi-permanent.

At the time Skylab was gestating, as part of the Apollo Applications Program, NASA hoped to have access to a second batch of Saturn Vs and as of 1966 had planned missions for twenty five Saturn Vs (there were fifteen Saturn Vs produced in the first batch and ten more from an expected second batch. Obviously they never got the second batch).

Several Skylabs were planned as part of this proposed AAP flight schedule. So, I expect had any of this come to fruition, NASA would have been more interested in "disposable" Skylabs, at least for the decade of the '70s and only thereafter would they have turned their attention to a more permanent post-AAP/Skylab station.

I touch on this a bit in my article "The future of manned spaceflight: The view from 1966" in the Jan 2007 issue of Spaceflight.

Dwayne Day
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posted 07-27-2007 09:29 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Dwayne Day   Click Here to Email Dwayne Day     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Mr. Frieling makes a good point--NASA's original thinking about Skylab was to build several of them.

And something else to keep in mind--when exactly were things happening? I suspect that the decisions that locked them into a disposable Skylab were made early on, when they still had the mindset that they were going to build several Skylabs. They would not have started thinking about what comes _after_ Skylab until much later. So if you want to prove the theory that they _deliberately_ avoided making it reusable because they wanted to ensure that they got a new program to follow it, you'd have to demonstrate that these decisions were made at a time when they were already thinking about a replacement.

These mild conspiracy theories exist for several different projects--it's a variation of the story about "burning your boats so that you cannot go back" theme. The most notable is the Saturn decision. Various people have claimed over the years that NASA deliberately destroyed the Saturn V blueprints in order to ensure that they got the Space Shuttle. But the problem is that if you look at NASA's actual documentation, they really wanted to keep Saturn around, and they made efforts to preserve the engines in particular.

kr4mula
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From: Cinci, OH
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posted 07-27-2007 12:22 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for kr4mula   Click Here to Email kr4mula     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Sorry for hijacking the thread.

I've certainly heard a lot of rumors about political motives and technical decisions at NASA, particularly related to the shuttle program, and always took them with a grain of salt. In most cases, it would be pretty tough to substantiate them, but somewhat easier to disprove them (as in this case) based on chronologies established via documents, if one had the time. This was one that had always floated around in the back of my mind, but not being an expert on either MSFC or Skylab, I never checked it out. This story may very well have originated in the JSC-MSFC rivalry, where JSC engineers scoffed at their Alabama counterparts designing a limited life, critical system.

All times are CT (US)

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