Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations

515 Pages·2017·6.07 MB·English

by  Jay Chladek

Outposts on the Frontier
Outward Odyssey
A People’s History of Spaceflight
Series editor
Colin Burgess
Outposts on
the Frontier
A Fifty- Year History of Space Stations
Jay Chladek
Foreword by Clayton C. Anderson
UNI V ER SI T Y OF NEBR A SK A PRESS • L INCOL N & LONDON
© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940995
Set in Adobe Garamond Pro by Rachel Gould.
To Alice Anderson
and
James M. Busby
One helped to teach future generations,
while the other helped them to learn
the history of the future

Contents
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xv
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
1. Humble Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
2. Chelomei and Almaz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3. Salyut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69
4. The Apollo Applications Project . . . . . . . . . . 109
5. The Rocky Road to Salyut Success . . . . . . . . . 147
6. On- Orbit Diplomacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
7. Salyut Endurance! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
8. European Participation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
9. Soviet Space Station Mir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
10. The Odd Couple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
11. The International Space Station . . . . . . . . . . 341
12. Columbia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
13. Construction Resumes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
14. Final Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473

Illustrations
1. Wernher von Braun’s wheeled space station concept
from 1952 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2. Manned Orbiting Laboratory concept. . . . . . . . 18
3. Fourteen of the seventeen mol astronauts
selected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4. The first mol test launch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5. Illustration of the mol. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
6. Showing how the mol’s optics could examine
alternative areas on the ground . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7. Vladimir Chelomei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
8. Minister Dmitry Ustinov . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
9. Chelomei’s ur- 500 Proton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
10. The Almaz system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
11. Almaz and the Soyuz spacecraft . . . . . . . . . . . 63
12. Konstantin Feoktistov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
13. The first civilian station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
14. The Soyuz 11 crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
15. George Mueller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111
16. A 1968 drawing of the s- ivb wet workshop . . . . .119
17. Illustration of Skylab. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
18. Skylab’s first crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137