Fwd: The Story of Project Juno

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: May 26, 2013 1:54:29 PM GMT-06:00
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: The Story of Project Juno

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
May 25th, 2013

'No Experience Necessary': The Story of Project Juno (Part 1)

By Ben Evans

 

Surrounded by Soviet cosmonauts Musa Manarov, Sergei Krikalev, and Viktor Afanasyev, the first Briton in space enjoys the weightless environment. Helen Sharman's flight was mired in controversy, as well as political and financial difficulty, from the outset and was seen by many as little more than a publicity stunt. Photo Credit: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

Few British space enthusiasts can possibly forget the famous plethora of posters, newspaper advertisements, and radio and television announcements which materialised nationwide throughout the summer of 1989. Astronaut Wanted, they crowed, No Experience Necessary. It was typically indicative of the understated humour of an island kingdom whose imperial history, wealth, and technological prowess in the 19th and 20th centuries had given way to a surprising dearth of activity in the human space flight sphere. Although the United Kingdom had become the sixth nation to launch a homegrown satellite into the heavens—tiny "Prospero," atop a Black Arrow rocket from Woomera, South Australia, in October 1971—its aspirations in space exploration almost exclusively focused upon unmanned research, with particular emphasis upon the Earth sciences. During the course of the 1980s, despite the formation of the British National Space Centre (BNSC), the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher virtually gutted any chance of a human space programme.

Nonetheless, efforts were afoot in the pre-Challenger era to send at least one Briton into orbit aboard the shuttle. Squadron Leader Nigel Wood of the Royal Air Force was slated to fly in June 1986 as a payload specialist to observe the deployment of the Ministry of Defence's Skynet 4A communications satellite. Planning for this mission had been formally announced more than two years earlier, in January 1984, when the MoD revealed that it would launch Skynet 4A and 4B on the shuttle. However, it reserved the right to fly its third satellite—Skynet 4C—aboard Ariane, thereby demonstrating visible support for the European booster. "The £60 million or so that it will cost to fly two Skynet 4s on Shuttle is probably slightly cheaper than flying on Ariane," Flight International reported at the time, "and no doubt was a factor in selecting the American launcher."

Rumours of shortlisted candidates from the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy proved accurate when, in February 1984, four finalists were selected. In addition to Wood, they were civilian physicist Christopher Holmes, who was the deputy manager of the Skynet 4 project, together with two military officers, Peter Longhurst of the Navy and Tony Boyle of the Royal Signals. (Boyle was replaced by fellow Signals officer Richard Farrimond in July.) Wood's selection as the prime payload specialist was revealed in May 1985, and he trained to conduct a series of six British experiments focusing on the effects of cosmic radiation, changes in head-eye co-ordination and adaptation to weightlessness, studies of adhesive bonding, the ability to estimate mass in microgravity, motor skills—including postural control—and an ergonomics experiment. The loss of Challenger in January 1986 ended Wood's chances of ever reaching space.

The United Kingdom's first home-grown-and-launched satellite, Prospero, is prepared for flight. Photo Credit: UK Space Agency

Then came "Project Juno," the effort to send a Briton into space aboard a Soviet Soyuz-TM spacecraft for a week-long mission to Mir. And for Helen Patricia Sharman the radio announcement of Astronaut Wanted, No Experience Necessary was aired in June 1989, whilst she was sitting in a traffic jam during the drive home from her employer, the Mars confectionery company, in Slough, Berkshire, where she worked as a research chemist investigating the flavourant properties of chocolate. The 26-year-old Sharman was heading back to her flat in Surbiton, southwest London, and in her autobiography, Seize the Moment, she described the events of that evening as "the rarest of moments," which hindsight would convince her was "the crucial, pivotal moment in my life." From that moment onward, she was an integral part of the selection process for Britain's first astronaut … and less than two years later, in May 1991, she became not only the first Briton ever to enter space, but made the United Kingdom the first of only three nations to date to have a woman as its first astronaut. (Sharman has since been joined by Iran's Anousheh Ansari in 2006 and by South Korea's Yi So-yeon in 2008.)

Sharman was born in Grenoside, a suburb of the industrial city of Sheffield, Yorkshire, on 30 May 1963, the daughter of a college lecturer father and a nurse mother, and received much of her early education in her home town. In her autobiography, she described her upbringing as decidedly unremarkable and eventually entered the University of Sheffield to study chemistry, graduating in 1984. She first worked as an engineer for the General Electric Company in London—"even though the salary on offer was the lowest," she admitted, "the work they were offering was varied … [and] I wanted to sample the bright lights of the South-East"—and her role encompassed solving production problems, organising schedules, and doing research and development of cathode ray tube components.

At length, GEC offered her the chance to pursue a PhD in chemistry, and in 1985 Sharman enrolled at Birkbeck College in London to explore the luminescence of rare-earth ions in crystals and glasses. Two years later, she began working for Mars Confectionery as a research technologist planning new ice-cream products. Sharman found the work fascinating, not least in the fact that it enabled her to incorporate many facets of everyday life into her work. "It's no good understanding and manipulating the chemistry of emulsifiers in your ice-cream," she wrote, "if the toffee falls off the ice-cream before it's had a chance to harden." That technical knowledge and practical experience, coupled with Sharman's uncommon ability to interact with people of different ages and backgrounds, would serve her well in the Project Juno selection process.

Astronaut Wanted, No Experience Necessary …

Project Juno was the first realised human space mission to involve a British astronaut … and one of the last commercial space ventures executed by the Soviet Union. Image Credit: ESA

As she drove home on that June evening in 1989, Sharman found herself musing on the fact that the job of astronaut—a career path that she had never considered possible—was fairly straightforward … at least on paper. She was British, she was aged between 21 and 40 years old, she had a formal scientific training, she had a proven ability to learn a foreign language (Sharman spoke French and German), and she had a high standard of physical fitness. When she applied, she was asked for a few basic details about herself, completed a form, and became one of more than 13,000 people who applied for the role. In the weeks which followed, the names were winnowed down to 150 and that of Sharman remained on the list. She attended a medical evaluation in London in August, which made her a member of the final 32 candidates, and was subsequently called to a meeting at Brunel University.

Whilst she was there, Sharman met fellow finalist Major Tim Mace, a 34-year-old helicopter pilot and accomplished parachutist in the Royal Army Air Corps. He was, she later wrote, "a pilot, an aeronautical engineer, and … Britain's skydiving champion." (Later in his career, Mace went on to serve in South Africa as President Nelson Mandela's helicopter pilot.) In Seize the Moment, Sharman recalled her personal conviction at the time that the smooth-talking Mace stood out as an obvious front-runner in the Juno competition.

"The stakes were much higher than any of us had realised," wrote Sharman. "The publicity would fuel the sponsorship, but for most of the applicants it would inevitably mean rejection in public." As the selection process continued into the latter part of 1989, the 32 remaining candidates were reduced in number to just 22, and later to 16. It was at this stage that her chances of selection seemed to vanish. "It seemed that the Russians had said, of the candidates being tested in Britain," Sharman explained, "that they wanted the two finalists to be of the same sex. They expressed no preference about male over female, but … with only two women left in the final 16, the odds against both of us beating all the men were negligible."

That negligibility increased when the number was reduced to ten and the only other woman in the competition was eliminated; shortly thereafter, after a visit from Soviet doctors, only six candidates remained. By the beginning of November, the four finalists were announced: Sharman and Mace, together with Royal Navy flight surgeon Gordon Brooks and Kingston Polytechnic aeronautical engineer Clive Smith. And by the end of November, Sharman and Mace had been picked to train for the mission and were flown into a snowy Star City, near Moscow, to begin 18 months of intensive preparations.

Pictured in the Mir simulator with Commander Anatoli Artsebarski (left) and Flight Engineer Sergei Krikalev, Helen Sharman experiences a light moment during training. Photo Credit: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

It was during that time that Project Juno came to a figurative and literal crossroads, with the axe of cancellation hanging ominously for some time. Right from the start, it had been a commercial enterprise, with a reported Soviet fee of around $12 million (£7.5 million). In Britain, Antequera, Ltd., was established to administer the selection process and the mission itself, but by the spring of 1990 it was evident that sponsorship was falling far short of the required level. British Aerospace, Memorex, and Interflora had joined the pool of corporate sponsors, and ITV had bought the television rights, but the consortium as a whole failed to raise the entire sum. (Once aboard Mir, Sharman would participate in a televised advert for Interflora, by "ordering" flowers for delivery to her mother.)

A paltry $1.7 in commercial revenue was generated and Antequera was dissolved. In the wake of this event, the British government refused to support the mission. Thankfully, by December, word reached Sharman and Mace that Moscow Norodny Bank—a Russian-owned (but London-based) commercial venture—had agreed to underwrite the final stages of Project Juno. In her autobiography, Sharman described the bank as "our white knight." It is believed that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev personally insisted that the mission proceed at his country's cost, in the interests of furthering international relations.

Quoted by Flight International in June 1991, veteran cosmonaut Alexei Leonov damningly noted that Project Juno "has not added to the prestige of our space research programme," although he acquiesced that Sharman herself worked "magnificently." To be fair, the financial situation posed little difference to the daily work of the cosmonaut trainees, but it was an embarrassment for Britain that their first foray into human space exploration should have been so mired with financial difficulties and should have come so close to the brink of outright collapse.

From an international perspective, it was humiliating that one of the richest and most technologically advanced nations on Earth should have been unwilling to claw itself out of such a position of reliance upon the Soviet Union. Its scientific questionability was placed on an equal footing to the flight of Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama, whose mission to Mir in December 1990 included televised broadcasts, the carriage of a few Japanese tree frogs and precious little else, and there was concern in the early stages of 1991 that Project Juno was an abject failure, even as a publicity stunt.

Writing in mid-May 1991, aerospace journalist Tim Furniss noted that France and Germany—the latter struggling with the costly process of reunification, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall—had parted with $50 million between them to fly a pair of their cosmonauts to Mir in 1992. "Britain's hitch-hike into space," wrote Furniss, "is the subject of much mirth and, in some quarters, anger." Project Juno and Britain's first astronaut would have a lot to prove on the long-awaited mission.

 

 

Copyright © 2013 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

===============================================================

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
May 26th, 2013

'No Experience Necessary': The Story of Project Juno (Part 2)

By Ben Evans

 

Helen Sharman's Sokol launch and entry suit, today housed at the National Space Centre in Leicester, United Kingdom. Photo Credit: Alan Saunders

Aside from issues of politics and finance—discussed in yesterday's article—the choice of Helen Sharman as the first Briton in space came on 19 February 1991, when Air Vice Marshal Peter Howard—former commandant of the Royal Air Force's Institute of Aviation Medicine, aerospace physician, and veteran of the world's first rocket-propelled ejection seat, who had been placed in charge of the Project Juno astronaut selection—arrived in Moscow for separate discussions with the two candidates. "They told me I was to be in the prime crew," Sharman recalled in her autobiography, Seize the Moment. "This would be subject to a medical examination in March and another immediately before the launch." Her backup, Army Air Corps Major Tim Mace, was characteristically gracious and the pair continued to work together, side by side, until, on 23 April, their formal training concluded. Less than a month remained before the launch of Soyuz TM-12.

Shoulder to shoulder with Sharman would be a pair of professional cosmonauts. In command of the mission was Anatoli Pavlovich Artsebarski, born in Prosyana, to the southeast of Kiev, within today's independent Ukraine, on 9 September 1956. He graduated from the Soviet Air Force Institute in 1977 and was selected for cosmonaut training in September 1985, alongside the man who would serve as his flight engineer on Soyuz TM-12, Sergei Krikalev. Artsebarski's first two years were spent preparing for the Buran shuttle project, but in 1987 he began working on Soyuz-TM and Mir. With Krikalev, he served on the backup crew for the joint Soviet-Japanese mission in December 1990. In Seize the Moment, Sharman described Artsebarski thus: "He's a good organiser, pays attention to detail, and has great stamina—he's always one of the last to leave a party." That stamina would be amply tested during the summer of 1991, as Artsebarski and Krikalev were required to support no fewer than six EVAs, totaling almost 32 hours in the vacuum of space.

Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev, meanwhile, was making the second of what would turn into a six-flight cosmonaut career and, at the time of writing, in early 2013, he holds the unchallenged record for having spent more cumulative time off the planet (803 days) than any other human being. Krikalev came from Leningrad—today's St. Petersburg—where he was born on 27 August 1958; his father was an engineer and his mother a survivor of the Nazi siege of Leningrad. After high school, Krikalev specialised in chemistry and entered the Leningrad Mechanical Institute, graduating first in his class in 1981 with a degree in mechanical engineering. As part of his studies, he worked on the design and manufacturing of  flight vehicles. Krikalev also served as an aircraft technician and learned to fly at a Leningrad aviation club. He joined Energia and was involved in the testing of space equipment and ground control operations; in fact, aged just 26, he worked on the Salyut 7 rescue team to develop contingency docking procedures with the inert station. (More than one source has commented that this work by Krikalev assured him of Soyuz T-13 commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov's support in his application to become a cosmonaut.) Krikalev also excelled in athletics, swimming, and aerobatics, and was a member of the Soviet national flying teams, winning the accolade of Champion of Moscow in 1983 and Champion of the Soviet Union in 1986. By this time, he had entered cosmonaut training, having been selected in September 1985, and worked for a time on the Buran programme. He was officially appointed as a "test-cosmonaut" in February 1987 and flew his first mission aboard Soyuz TM-7.

Sharman, Artsebarski, and Krikalev depart for launch on the morning of 18 May 1991. Photo Credit: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

Early on 18 May 1991, the prime crew and their backups—Alexander Volkov, Alexander Kaleri, and Tim Mace—stepped smartly through their final chores, in readiness for launch at Tyuratam. Out on the launch pad stood Soyuz TM-12 atop its rocket, whose nose shroud had been painted with both the Soviet Hammer and Sickle and the British Union Jack. Aboard the bus, Sharman was approached by Alexei Leonov, who offered her a number of "unofficial" items to carry aboard Mir: a Swiss army knife, a camera, several rolls of film … and a handful of grass. "I pick this for you," he told her, paraphrased in Seize the Moment. "Take it with you into the space station. There's nothing much to smell up there and this will remind you of home." The sweet-scented grass was polin, a kind of wormwood, or absinthe, which grew ubiquitously over the steppe of Kazakhstan.

Liftoff occurred precisely on time at 3:50 p.m. Moscow Time, amidst what Sharman could only describe as a steadily increasing, though muffled, rumbling. "I could feel the vibration, but no sense of acceleration," she wrote. Intellectually, she knew they must have left the ground, but was "in that momentary limbo where the rocket seems to balance precariously on its thrust, surely destined to topple." Yet topple it did not, for the acceleration steadily began to increase as Soyuz TM-12 thundered toward orbit. Her ears and senses attuned to every nuance from the rocket, indoctrinated through months of training, Sharman heard and felt the passage of maximum aerodynamic turbulence and the separation of the rocket's tapering strap-on boosters, until, finally, the escape tower and protective fairing was jettisoned, uncovering the capsule's windows for the first time and admitting a flood of sunlight. "Dreams sometimes do come true," Sharman mused in her autobiography, "and I felt so alive."

By five minutes, the central core stage of the booster had also been expended and was jettisoned, taking with it a flurry of ice particles. And finally, at eight minutes, as objects within the cabin seemed to ponder the question of whether or not they were still governed by terrestrial gravity or instead were the subjects of orbital free-fall, came the separation of the upper stage and the abrupt suddenness of arrival in space. "It did not happen gradually," Sharman wrote of the dying moments of the third stage. "One moment, it was burning ferociously behind me, in the next it stopped completely. One moment I was being pressed hard into my seat and in the next I was not. I had been straining against the G-force without realising I had been doing so." In front of the cosmonauts' eyes, the objects finally surrendered themselves to the peculiar state of "microgravity." They were weightless.

Helen Sharman roars into orbit as Britain's first spacefarer. Photo Credit: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

Two days later, on 20 May, Soyuz TM-12 drew toward Mir for the last stages of what should have been an automated docking with the station. Then, at a distance of 200 km, a malfunction in the Kurs rendezvous system forced Artsebarski to assume manual control of the final approach, earlier than normal, and docking was successfully accomplished with the front port of Mir's multiple docking adaptor and the visitors were quickly engulfed in bear hugs and a traditional bread-and-salt welcome from the resident crew, Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov. With the dismal demise of much British commercial participation in the mission, Sharman's experiment programme was almost exclusively designed by the Soviets, with a primary emphasis upon the life sciences. She wore electrodes to track her heart rate, monitored her mental co-ordination and reaction speed with the "Prognos" series of random light patterns, and took a dozen blood samples from the tips of her fingers each day. In this manner, she added "data points" to the standard monitoring of adaptation to weightlessness. Additionally, Sharman took air samples throughout Mir to assess the prevalence of dust in the station and participated in a number of "agricultural experiments." She grew wheat seedlings and potato roots, carried 125,000 pansy seeds—which were placed in the Kvant-2 airlock, the portion of the station least shielded from space radiation, to promote genetic mutations—for British schoolchildren, and supported high-temperature semiconducting experiments. Other work focused on the growth of luciferase protein crystals and the exposure of ceramic films to the harsh vacuum of space. Finally, a significant portion of Sharman's time was devoted to photography of the United Kingdom itself. Yet it was impossible to avoid the reality that much of the work was Soviet-devised, Soviet-orchestrated, and Soviet-financed. "Sharman will operate 17 biotechnological, medical, and technical experiments—all Soviet," wrote Tim Furniss in Flight International, shortly before launch. With undisguised scorn, he added that "the British element of the Project Juno mission will be Sharman herself … "

On the day after docking, 21 May, she was in the process of one of her radio contacts with British schools and happened to mention that Mir was experiencing difficulties with its solar arrays, caused by changes in orientation. Later, the level of background noise on the station fell dramatically from the normal 75 decibels, as fans, circulating pumps and other equipment, began shutting down. In Seize the Moment, Sharman related the eerie nature of the change as the five cosmonauts shared dinner in the base block. "The first fans to stop were those at the extremities of the station," she wrote, "in the Kristall and two Kvant modules; shortly afterwards, the fans in the base block slowed down, then halted. From being a noisy place, the space station became silent. After the fans, the lights extinguished themselves … all we were left with was a solitary emergency fluorescent tube … " A computer in the orientation system had failed some time ago, preventing the arrays from properly tracking the Sun, and as a consequence Mir's storage batteries were quickly drained. When the station re-entered orbital sunlight, its orientation was adjusted in order that its batteries could be recharged. Afanasyev and Manarov, by now old hands with more than five months aboard the station, assured her that such power outages were commonplace. Fortunately, a replacement computer had been brought along by Soyuz TM-12.

In keeping with other "standard" international visits of this era, Sharman's mission lasted a little under eight days, with undocking and the return to Earth scheduled for 26 May. She would come home with Afanasyev and Manarov, concluding their 175-day flight, aboard the old Soyuz TM-11 craft, leaving Artsebarski and Krikalev and the new Soyuz TM-12 behind. Planning at the time called for another mission—Soyuz TM-13, with an Austrian cosmonaut amongst its crew—to fly in October 1991, although the political and economic climate over the next few months was to change the Soviet Union beyond all recognition … as well as affecting the situation of the cosmonauts themselves. Few cosmonauts would be more affected by what happened in Russia in the latter half of 1991 than Sergei Krikalev.

Although efforts were made to develop a British set of experiments for Sharman, the bulk of her research aboard Mir was Soviet-provided, and the mission itself was little more than a political exercise. Photo Credit: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

Early on 26 May, at 9:13 a.m. Moscow Time, Soyuz TM-11 undocked from its berth at the Kvant-1 module and began the three-hour process of returning to Earth. As Viktor Afanasyev flew in formation with Mir and Manarov fired off photographs, Anatoli Artsebarski—a fan of the British pop/folk singer Tanita Tikaram—played out their final separation manoeuvre and departure with a tape of "World Outside Your Window," given to him by Sharman. Shortly after noon, the irreversible retrofire burn was performed and by 12:38 p.m. the orbital and instrument modules had been jettisoned, leaving only the descent module to endure the searing hypersonic descent through the atmosphere. Eleven minutes later, the drogue parachutes deployed. Conditions at the landing site in north-central Kazakhstan, near the industrial city of Jezkazgan, were windy, and Sharman remembered that much of the final descent was spent moving laterally with respect to the ground. Fifteen metres from touchdown, a proximity indicator illuminated and she informed Afanasyev and Manarov to brace themselves. A few seconds later, and a couple of metres above the Kazakh steppe, solid-fuelled retrorockets fired to cushion the impact. Although the capsule quickly tipped over in the high winds and bounced hard, it was nevertheless a successful landing.

It was 1:03 p.m. Moscow Time and Britain's first astronaut was safely home after a little under eight full days in space. At the conclusion of his second mission, Manarov became the undisputed record-holder for time in space, with a cumulative 541 days, easily eclipsing the 430 days of fellow cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko. Manarov would enter politics in the wake of his space career and served as a member of the Russian Duma. For her part, Helen Sharman embarked on a career in television and science promotion and applied unsuccessfully (as did Tim Mace) for admission into the European Space Agency's astronaut corps in 1992 and 1998. Only Viktor Afanasyev would fly again, and he would command three more missions, bridging the conclusion of the Mir era and the beginning of the International Space Station. As for Sharman's Soyuz TM-12 crewmates, Artsebarski would return to Earth in October 1991, according to pre-flight plans, and would never fly again. The case of Sergei Krikalev, though, would be far different as politics in Moscow took an ugly turn in mid-August. As circumstances transpired, Krikalev would not return to Earth until early 1992.

More than two decades have now passed since Helen Sharman inaugurated Britain's adventure in human space exploration. Fellow "Britons" have followed in her footsteps, but not with the official support and sanction of the U.K. government: Mike Foale, Piers Sellers, and Nick Patrick—though born and raised in Britain—acquired U.S. citizenship in order to become NASA astronauts and flew with the Stars and Stripes on their shoulders. Others, including Mark Shuttleworth and Richard Garriott, flew as self-funded "space tourists." However, in 2009 former Royal Army Air Corps helicopter pilot Tim Peake was selected as an astronaut candidate by the European Space Agency (ESA). Last week, in a blaze of publicity, he received an official assignment to an International Space Station mission in 2015-16. Whilst Sharman opened the door for U.K. astronauts to explore space, her legacy will be continued by Peake as the first official representative of the British government to fly a space mission.

 

Copyright © 2013 AmericaSpace - All Rights Reserved

 

===============================================================