Felxibility of Apollo design (was Space station future adrift (Soyuz purchase crisis) )

Jeff Findley ) wrote:

"John Doe" wrote in message ...
NASA built Apollo for a single very precise mission: get a few
humans to moon
and back.

This is not right. NASA was working on Apollo as a general purpose
spacecraft before they got the "to the moon" mandate from Kennedy.

Apollo was a very good general purpose capsule, as evidenced by its use for
lunar missions, Skylab missions, and ASTP. Other uses were planned as part
of the Apollo Applications Project, but those were all cancelled when it was
decided that the shuttle would replace Apollo/Saturn. Skylab and ASTP were
the two remaining bits from the AAP program.

Correct, sort of. I knew Owen Maynard, one of the engineers who was
first hired into the Space Task Group in 1959, and who (after working
on Mercury for some months---including doing some scuba diving to
retrieve bits of MA-1 from the ocean floor!) was moved in 1960 into
the group working on early systems engineering for post-Mercury
missions. According to Murray&Cox's Apollo book, that group had been
formed to "start thinking about a lunar mission in a more organized
fashion" (several people in NASA at the time, including Max Faget, had
been thinking/talking about Lunar missions for awhile before then).
From Owen's reminisces, the approach taken by that group appears to
have been to back off a bit from just Lunar missions, to try to map
out a variety of possible post-Mercury missions; the Apollo spacecraft
concept was then developed to envelope those missions. That's where
the modular concept for Apollo came from, since some missions would
need things that others wouldn't, and with a modular concept you could
keep what you needed from the basic concept for a given mission,
without having to carry along massive things you didn't need. (Owen
may well have made the first sketches of the overall Apollo
configuration.)

In parallel with this, I'm sure that various senior NASA managers were
lobbying up through the chain of command for some sort of
life-after-Mercury mission for NASA. Various concepts for this mission
were undoubtedly floated, including the Lunar mission concept; it
appears that the working-level engineers and engineering managers were
pushing for this one, but they didn't know if the administration would
bite, so they also offered up other concepts, just in case.

One of Owen's stories was about the designs for the Mars mission and
the Earth-orbiting space station that they did around the same time as
they did the Lunar mission design. They all used the Apollo spacecraft
design as their basis for moving astronauts to and fro. I have in
front of me right now, a drawing that Owen left me, of the "Radial
Module All-Rigid Space Station" that one of the draftsment did for him
in 1962; designed to be launched on a Saturn V, using a ciyple of
"6-man ferry-logistics vehicles" docked to it, basically an Apollo
CSM. Owen also prepared (and patented) a design for a trans-Mars space
station based on this design (I think that one was planning on using a
NERVA upper stage to push it out to Mars and back again)---this was
actually released by one of the commercial model companies as a
plastic kid's model in the 1960s, as "NASA's Space Station."

The impression that Owen gave me was basically that these three files
(space station, Lunar mission and Mars mission) were developed to
similar levels by the engineering team, and used as lures by Gilruth
et al. to tempt Kennedy's administration into agreeing to some sort of
post-Mercury program. There's a famous memo assocaited with Kennedy's
Lunar mission decisio that alludes to these. If Kennedy and his
advisors had been jsut a little more nervous about how far ahead
they'd have to aim in order to be sure the Russians wouldn't be able
to catch up with them, he mght have ended up picking the Mars mission
instead, in which case Owen and company would have focused their
efforts on moving that one beyond the concept phase. What a "What
If...? scenario! (Interestingly, it appears that whatever mission was
chosen at that point was going to be named Apollo.)

- Kieran A. Carroll