Moonlab

By J.L. Avey

Project Moonlab was conceived as a test bed for establishing a permanent base on the moon. It arrived on the heels of Apollo and expanded humanity's understanding of its nearest neighbor. Relive the high points and low of Moonlab in this brief alternate history of its missions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.L. Avey
• Release date: Jun 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005071493

Book preview

I) Prelude to Moonlab

The road to Moonlab leads back to 1961, shortly after Alan Shepard’s fifteen minute flight. President John Kennedy surprised the world as he announced that NASA would land a man on the moon and return him to Earth by the end of the decade. Whether or not Kennedy had 1969 or 1970 in mind as the end of the decade will never be known. What is known for certain was that everyone in NASA believed him quite mad. America had yet to send astronauts into low Earth orbit and now were expected to beat the Soviet Union to the moon.

The challenges faced in reaching the moon ranged from laughable in retrospect to deadly serious. In the beginning, NASA doctors had serious doubts about whether or not an astronaut could even survive weightlessness for the duration of the voyage. Looking back over the decades, their fears were revealed to be ridiculous to say the least. Man can breath while in microgravity, the heart pumps blood and the digestive system functions with little trouble, though anyone who had ever suffered space sickness might disagree with the assessment.

Engineers worried about whether or not rendezvous in orbit was feasible or even possible. Though it was not quite as simple as two spacecraft launched with exact timing, it proved nowhere near as impossible as a few engineers, mostly those in favor of Direct Ascent, claimed. The notion of Lunar Orbital Rendezvous, while now quite proven, at first met with skepticism when first proposed.

More serious was the problem of extra vehicular activity. EVAs during the Gemini missions tested astronauts to their physical limits while putting one at severe risk. The problem lay not in physics but rather in the way NASA approached the task and more importantly how the astronauts trained. Edwin Aldrin remedied the initial problem when he threw a space capsule into a large swimming pool and dove in after it. Though not actually weightless, the buoyancy of an environmental suit in water mimics conditions experienced in space.

The biggest stumbling block on the road to the moon came in the form of Apollo I. A fire erupted in an oxygen-rich environment of the low quality capsule, all but gutting it, killing three astronauts in the process. The fire forced NASA and North American-Rockwell engineers to redesign the Apollo command module from the ground up, delaying the first successful launch by eighteen months. When launched in October 1968, Apollo VII worked like a dream. Apollo VIII was originally poised to run the first tests of the lunar module in Earth orbit. It was an essential step in the process for if the LM failed to maneuver as advertised then the 1969/70 deadline would never be met.

Months prior to Apollo VIII’s launch, the CIA discovered the massive N1 rocket sitting on a Soviet launch pad in Kazakhstan undergoing preparations for launch. The N1 was the Soviet’s answer to the Saturn V, with the explicit purpose of placing a Soyuz spacecraft into lunar orbit. It was feared that the Soviets were in the process of preparing their first moon shot, a founded fear for it was precisely what the USSR planned. Little did the CIA or NASA know at the time that the N1 was plagued with technical difficulties, delaying the first circumnavigation of the moon by cosmonauts until June 1969, six months after Apollo VIII returned from the first circumnavigation and one month after Apollo X returned from testing the LM in lunar orbit.

When it became clear to Soviet leaders that the first man on the moon would not be a cosmonaut, plans went into effect to tromp the impending American landing. One of the Soviet backup plans came in the form of a sample return probe. While it would only return with a few grams of regolith compared to the eventual Apollo return of 439 kg of lunar material, the Soviets hoped to pull off a propaganda coup by showing that they could return samples at a fraction of NASA’s price, despite the millions of rubles spent on Soyuz.

Luna 15 touched down just two days before Apollo XI and despite some technical difficulties, it successful launched its sample return which beat the American back to Earth by mere hours. Unfortunately, after re-entry, the parachute on the return capsule failed to deploy properly, causing it to land at far greater speeds than designed. While the sample survived impact, it was too contaminated to be of much use in research. With their efforts to one-up the Americans over, Premier Brezhnev was forced to call President Nixon and congratulate the United States on its amazing achievement. It was by no means admitting defeat.

The Soviets launched three more sample return missions, all landing successfully. Few outside of the Soviet Bloc noticed the accomplishment. Probes returning with a few grams of dust simply failed to capture the world’s imagination like watching an astronaut walking on the surface of another world. Though now clearly behind the American space effort, the Soviets continued pushing forward with their own manned landings. They set 1971 as the first goal, then 1972 and finally settling for 1974. The first cosmonaut, Alexi Leonov, did not set foot upon the moon until well after the final Apollo moon mission departed for Earth and only two months before the arrival of the first manned Moonlab mission.

If not for the continued Soviet push for the moon, it is entirely possible that the moon program would have found itself a victim of reduced budgets after the final Apollo mission. In 1970, President Richard Nixon had three options presented to him from NASA. 1) A proposal to develop Earth orbital infrastructure. At face value, it appears the most reasonable of the solution; developing the means to reach orbit at ever lowering prices. Beneath the surface, it amounted largely to a push by the United States Air Force for the rolling out of a reusable spacecraft.

A reusable vehicle, one that the generals claimed would launch with as little as week turnaround at a fraction of a rocket’s price, found support in the Air Force as a mean to quickly deploy and retrieve satellites and even carry nuclear weapons. One of the arguments against the shuttle was that it was not reusable, rather rebuildable, a vehicle that requires refurbishment after every launch. Decades later, the