One False Step Read online

  One False Step...

  Richard Tongue

  Copyright 2011, 2014 Richard Tongue

  Second Kindle Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage or retrieval systems, without written permission from the author. The only exception is for reviews, where short excerpts are permissible.

  To everyone who dares not only to dream great dreams, but tries to make them reality...

  ...this book is respectfully dedicated...

  Introduction

   I like heroes. That's one of the primary reasons I am fascinated by the space program. It is amazing to read of Yuri Gagarin making his famous first orbit, flying over the Earth and becoming the first man to see that globe with his own eyes, or Ed White pushing himself out of his spacecraft, floating free of his spacecraft, or Neil Armstrong taking his one small step that took mankind into a new era, changing the world forever.

   Everyone remembers those great leaps forward. But who today remembers Pete Conrad flying Gemini 13 around the moon, becoming the first man to see its dark side with his own eyes? Or Dick Gordon landing Apollo 18 on the moon, setting a new pinpoint landing record? Or the great discoveries made by Fred Haise on Apollo 19? Who remembers holding their breath waiting for news when Apollo 20 began its climatic descent onto the far side of the moon, Deke Slayton bringing an amazing career to an end with the test flight to beat them all? Who saw the footage of a gleeful Alexei Leonov taking his first steps on the moon? Who still recalls NASA's celebration of the Bicentenary of the United States by sending Al Bean and his crew on a close flyby of the mysterious planet Venus?

   Well, no-one remembers these things today, because they didn't happen. But they might have done. All of these projects were planned at one stage, and many of them came surprisingly close to implementation. All of these projects saw people's hopes and dreams poured into them, only for those hopes to be dashed. Some astronauts and cosmonauts spent years training for missions that never happened, forced to wait for years to fly into space, if they ever had the chance.

   There is something strangely intriguing about these projects, projects that today are nothing more than fading blueprints and increasingly forgotten ideas. This was an era where they dared to dream magnificent dreams, and more – they dared to try and make these dreams come true. Dreams such as sending a man into space, and putting a man on the moon. As these events recede further into history, it seems harder and harder to believe – but they happened!

   They could have done so much more. NASA had plans for establishing a permanent base on the moon, using Apollo-era technology to construct and support it – and so did the Soviets, who hoped to use their treacherous N-1 booster to beat the Americans to the moon. There were schemes to use the same technology that put a man on the moon to send three men on a close flyby of the planet Venus, firing a series of probes to investigate that hostile planet, and even to land a crew on the planet Mars by 1986! This year of 2011 could have been the 25th anniversary celebration of the first man to walk on Mars, if the will had remained to do it.

   But no bucks, no Buck Rogers. As the crew of Apollo 11 returned from the moon, it seemed that they left the defining spirit of their age behind them, and an age of retrenchment began. A pair of Saturn V rockets that could have sent two more crews to the moon were left to rust. The Soviet Union rejected any claims that they were attempting to land on the moon, and the LK lunar lander was stored away, and is now buried away in a museum, instead of resting where it belongs – in moon dust. The United States spent six years without putting a man into space, and now confines itself to low Earth orbit. (And now again appears to be leaving itself without the capability to put a man in space, this time without even any defined program to return.)

   It might have been different. Everything I wrote about in the second paragraph of this introduction could have come to pass. Here's how.

  Chapter 1: Heirs of the Columbiad

   In 'From the Earth to the Moon', Jules Verne spins an entertaining tale of a group of arms manufacturers who made their fortunes from the American Civil War, using their knowledge (specifically of a fantastic new explosive of awesome power) to launch an expedition to the Moon. In the event, the intrepid early astronauts fail to actually reach the Moon, but instead fly around the Moon and return to Earth – fortunate in their case, as it was a one-way trip, with no way to return from the Moon – unless they could find some friendly locals willing to construct another vast cannon for the purposes of their return.

   Fiction and fantasy? Correct; the scientific principles involved in this book were dubious at the time, and are beyond fantastic today. Nevertheless, there is an historical analogue to the brave adventurers of the Columbiad, to be found at a U.S. Army Ordinance base in Huntsville, Alabama. Here a group of men, using knowledge earned in their last great war, also reached for the Moon with considerably greater success, though in the end the success would not be their own.

   The beginnings of the U.S. Army space program originated almost entirely from World War II. Previously, research in rocketry was limited to a few brave adventures as far as the United States were concerned, men like Robert Goddard who toiled alone in the desert with minimal public support or attention. The experience of the Second World War, however, proved that if it was not already a viable military tool, the guided missile would certainly prove a tool worthy of development in the next war.

   It would be Germany that provided this lesson, as their V-2 rocket bombarded London, albeit with minimal accuracy and only limited success (except that it provided many false assumptions about the superiority of German technology in general, an early example of psychological warfare), and later attacked Allied forces in Germany (though again with little more than a psychological effect). The historical record is littered with examples of men who would later become pioneers in American rocketry almost falling victim to early examples of this technology.

   It was not only in the long-range guided missile that scope was seen for the future, with both the Soviet and British forces deployed missiles in quantities, the famed 'Stalin's Organs' and the 'Land Mattress', and weapons such as the bazooka reached the battlefield in time for D-Day. Clearly there was wide scope for such weapons to be further developed, and just as clearly it would be the Army that would be the lead agency in their development – after all, they were artillery.

   The Allied Powers, at the conclusion of the Second World War, inherited the expertise that the Germans had developed in the course of the conflict and before, acknowledged as the most advanced and sophisticated missiles in existence, as well as the men who had designed and developed them. As well as the talent, a large quantity of hardware was obtained, including hundreds of V-2 rockets, divided among the victorious Allies. The squabble for personnel was won by the Americans; the Red Army's reputation as it steamrollered across Europe was such that many who the Soviet Union might have wished to bring behind the Iron Curtain instead opted to surrender to the Americans, notable among them Wernher Von Braun, a key player in this story.

   However, it would be inaccurate to say that the Soviets were completely unsuccessful, and they were able to acquire the services of several highly competent scientists and engineers. (Though they tended to use them in very different ways than the Americans; the United States opted to allow 'their' Germans to operate as a unit, and continue to work together, while the Soviet Union instead elected to employ them in more of a training capacity, sending them back to East Germany once they were finished with them.)

   The first priority was to test-fly the V-2 rocket; this development pattern would be replicated in the
United States, Britain and Soviet Union. The United States began test-flights out of White Sands, New Mexico, in 1946. Initially the purpose was engineering research and development, but increasingly a scientific program was adopted. Given the quantity of available V-2 rockets, there was a prolonged delay in a scientific successor, though by the early 1950s the Viking program had begun to develop a domestic high-altitude rocket, though only around a dozen of these flights flew.

   Von Braun and his team were not involved in this work for long; the Army realised their value and set them to work on the design of new medium-range rockets, designed for battlefield use. This might have been the Army's policy, and certainly the scientific team worked along these lines, but given Von Braun's increasingly public space advocacy during the early 1950s, it seems somehow doubtful that it was his.

   Since the earliest days in the German rocket group, long before the Second World War, the ultimate objective was space. Just as the Russians fired primitive liquid-fuelled engines and dreamed of flying to Mars, the Germans sought space. These dreams did not change, even though their rockets were militarised for war; blueprints exist for a manned V-2, though it is doubtful if it could have reached space with such a bulky payload. Further rockets, developed during the early days of the war, would have been capable of reaching space with a man on board, but the requirements and limitations of wartime research caused such programmes to be halted. Spaceflight had been the objective in those early days and so it remained.

   It would be the V-2 that first entered space itself, launched from White Sands with a second stage consisting of a WAC-Corporal missile, developed a group of researchers at Caltech in a project dating back to 1944; this combination attained an altitude of 250 miles in February 1949. Though the first satellites were still some years away, conducting research into the nature of space had passed out of the realm of theory into the realm of the possible.

   Complicating missile development in this period, as well as a great many other program, was a decision that had evolved out of the Second World War to make the Army Air Corps an independent service, the United States Air Force. The United States had been slow to create an independent Air Force, most other nations had entered the war with such a service, naturally enough with mixed results. During the war, however, the USAAC increasingly acted as an independent entity, and gained an ever-increasing proportion of Army personnel, materiel, and research and development work.

   Once the war was over, it was inevitable that a return to the early status quo would be ruled out of the question, and the decision was taken to create the independent Air Force in 1947. The decision to create a third service was only the beginning of the dispute, as all three of the parties involved had different ideas about what form such as service would take in practice. Despite some early suggestions that Naval aviation should be absorbed by the new USAF, this was ruled out at an early stage, so the greatest conflict, as might have been expected, was between the Army and the new Air Force.

   The Air Force sought total independence, and total control of the field of aviation, with all the supply and logistic support that this implied; many in the Army thought that it would be easier to retain the set-up that currently existed, and resisted such change. In terms of personnel, the Air Force found it generally difficult to obtain the services of non-flying officers in such key areas as logistics and technological development. While some could be created internally, it would mean that the Air Force would be far more reliant on outside contractors for development than had been the case for the Army and Navy.

   The 'roles and missions' debate would be ongoing, and to an extent, still is today. The Army preferred to retain at least some part of the aerial mission; transport aircraft, close ground support, reconnaissance aircraft and similar roles, while the Air Force demanded that anything that flew should have 'USAF' emblazoned proudly on its wings. Fundamentally, it came down to trust. The Army knew what it needed, and knew that left to itself, the Air Force might not provide it – the fear was that the greater focus would be on strategic bombing, especially with the recent development of the atomic bomb, and later the hydrogen bomb. These fears were somewhat justified based on the usual arguments for an independent air force, going back to Generals Douhet and Mitchell – that strategic bombardment was a tool that could knock a country out of the war. Arguably this had failed in World War II, but the new atomic bombs promised a way to make these dreams become a reality.

   The Air Force position was that the Army did not have the intuitive grasp of aerial strategy that allowed them to employ it as it should be employed, and that their focus was limited to only a fraction of the potential of air power; to be fair, there are numerous examples of this type of failure of imagination in the Second World War.

   A factor that complicated proceedings still further was the aforementioned atomic bomb. It had dramatically ended the war against Japan in a matter of days, without a costly invasion that would have cost the lives of millions on both sides. It had public appeal and support, at a level that could only be dreamed of today by the nuclear weapon advocates. It was the 'sexy' new technology that was attracting both funding and support, and each of the three services wanted to have their piece of the pie.

   In the 1940s, the only method of delivering a nuclear bomb – other than by handcart – was by bomber, and a squadron trained for the delivery of such weapons operated out of the quiet and innocuous town of Roswell, New Mexico. The other services were determined to have their own methods of deployment; the Navy was planning the construction of aircraft carriers large enough to operate the heavy bombers required to carry the nuclear weapons of the era, and the Army, well – the Army was planning to mount its nuclear weapons on missiles.

   The Navy didn't get its carriers; these behemoths were cancelled as construction was beginning on the first model, but all three services would retain elements of the nuclear mission. The Air Force, broadly speaking, would have their primary focus on strategic deployment, while the Navy and Army would be more interested in battlefield deployment of their weapons. (It would not be for another decade that the Navy would become a part of the strategic nuclear arsenal with the development and deployment of the ballistic missile submarine.)

   In terms of the Army deployment of nuclear weapons, the Air Force was not finished. With some justification they suggested that a missile flying into the upper atmosphere – or even into space itself – was hardly a 'battlefield' weapon, and weapons like this were on the drawing board. The Army countered with the concept that these should be considered along the lines of artillery, as they had no manned component and were operated from fixed sites.

   At this early stage, years before any development had begun, before the consideration of a long-range Army missile went into the planning stage, the Army can be said to have lost the 'space race'; the Air Force won the day, and would begin the design and development of missiles for the long-range strategic mission in the form of the Atlas missile. The Army would content itself with shorter-ranged battlefield devices instead. The only long-range missile that they would continue with would be the Redstone, a tactical missile that had originated in concept in 1946.

   The Redstone originated as a design need for a long-range tactical missile, following a doctrine prevalent at the time known as the 'deep battlefield' concept; the idea being that vastly increased mobility meant that in the future, battlefields would be measured with depths of dozens of miles, ranging across wide swathes of territory; this had increasingly been the case in the latter days of the Second World War.

   By 1951, the design specifications called for a missile possessing a range of five hundred miles, which could be deployed under battlefield conditions; in this they were following the design philosophies of the V2. The weight of the warhead grew to a substantial 6,900 pounds, which at the time was feared to have serious implications for the potential range with the engines available. (In context, the 200-mile range V2 carried a warhead o
f 2,200 pounds.) The first model was to be launched in 1953, with development coming to an end in the following year.

   Contracts were signed on the wide range of required components, and the work began. Chrysler became the lead contractor for the project, beginning a long association with long-range Army missiles. North American Aviation, the company that would eventually build the capsules to send men to the Moon, was also involved.

   Ultimately, although the large payload weight and other performance requirements were essentially attained, the range was, as feared, significantly compromised; two hundred miles was eventually obtained by modified variants. However, deployment proceeded almost on schedule, and the U.S. Army had its medium-range missile. A new project would be required if a missile of the designed ranges was to be obtained, and preliminary design work began.

   The Army retained the leading missile development team, arguably the leaders in the world at that time – Von Braun and his group, now operating out of Huntsville, Alabama, at the Army's Redstone Arsenal. With the nuclear 'mission' now denied them, the idea of working on other projects opened up, and in 1954, the idea of Project Orbiter was floated. It had become apparent that the Army had the potential to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth using equipment that was then available – the new Redstone missile.

   A joint Army-Navy project was mooted to work on just such a goal, and the timing was excellent – planning for the forthcoming International Geophysical Year was entering advanced stages, and it had already been suggested that a key component could be the launch of a satellite for the purposes of scientific investigation. By the end of the year, the Office of Naval Research had begun to issue contracts to further investigate this concept, and a multidisciplinary team was working on the principles involved.