Apollo-Soyuz: The Joint Hoax?
Chapter 5
A first in the history of the Baikonur Cosmodrome
In the 1970s Major-General V.F. Popov (retired) was the deputy head of the Baikonur cosmodrome and the chief engineer; 28 years after the ASTP flight he tells the following story:1a, 1b
Few people know that on July 15, 1975, the Soyuz 19 might not have taken off into orbit. For the reason that new instruments were installed, and the weight of the spaceship had grown significantly. Three months before the flight calculations showed that it was necessary to increase the amount of fuel in the tanks.
Tanks for liquid oxygen would solve the problem, but only in case that kerosene was cooled in the tanks down to +8°C. At Baikonur the temperature in the shade reaches 34-38°C in July. The railroad cisterns filled with kerosene stood in the open.
The space industry was unable to design and build a necessary cooler within three months. Therefore the command of the cosmodrome was set the task of cooling 180 tons of kerosene (three railroad cisterns). Within two weeks the cooler* was manufactured and ready. As a result, kerosene was supplied to the launch pad at a temperature of +6°C and fuelled the tanks of the launch vehicle.
"Three months before the flight." That is, in April 1975 (V.F. Popov does not mention the exact date of the order) the head of the cosmodrome was informed of the excess weight of the craft and was tasked with cooling the kerosene. The author received an interesting letter from his colleague (also a design engineer) that reads,
How could it happen that only three months before the launch it became known about this excess of estimated mass? Such calculations are generally made much earlier, when ALL new parts of the Soyuz-M craft were still being designed and tested. Under the guise of an unexpected increase in weight of the ship the planners of a classified part of the ASTP sneaked in some American video equipment.
That's why such a situation occurred just three months before take-off – at the ‘last minute’ a weight increase was discovered due to the US video replay equipment. This was a situation that was not taken into account anywhere in the Soviet design documentation. And to suggest that our designers had calculated the exact weight of the Soyuz-M only three months before the launch date would certainly never happen. I can tell you this as an experienced design engineer. (emphasis added)
If the cooling of the kerosene had been routinely practiced at Baikonur before July 1975, then the order for the cosmodrome staff to urgently design and manufacture a kerosene cooler would simply not have been required. But there is documentary evidence to confirm that filling the tanks of the rocket with cooled kerosene at the cosmodrome was actually a technological first. "This work was highly appreciated as a valuable innovation, and the Minister of Defense paid the author a reward of 1500 rubles, which amounted to several times more than his monthly salary."1b
It took quite a few years before filling rocket tanks with cooled kerosene would be adopted as common practice, for example, when launching the Zenit rocket. But this was 10 years after the ASTP flight. The first Zenit took off in 1985 from the very same Baikonur cosmodrome. So in July 1975 the task of cooling kerosene was a very unusual operation indeed.
By how much did the rocket’s payload increase?
The density of kerosene increases by 3% when cooled down from 36°C to 6°C.2 Accordingly, the mass of kerosene is increased by 3% when refueling the Soyuz 19 rocket tanks. One rocket puts one spacecraft into orbit. Two rockets fuelled with exactly twice as much kerosene will put two Soyuz craft into orbit. Therefore, a 3% increase in the kerosene fuel of a single rocket will increase its payload capacity by 3% as well. The nominal Soyuz weight, launched into orbit by the advanced 11A511U launcher, is 6800 kg. Such a weight was planned by the Soyuz-M designers (see Chapter 1) 3% of this weight is 200kg. That's by how much the Soyuz 19 would have gotten heavier, therefore cooling the kerosene was a necessity.
Note: The precise calculation, carried out by A. Bulatov using the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation and numerical simulation, gives the same results.
Therefore, the lifting capacity of the improved rocket was increased by another 200 kg – exactly the weight allocation for that extra US video replay equipment.
Why are designers remaining silent about making the rocket heavier?
There is not a word about any kerosene cooling in the very voluminous book Soyuz and Apollo, published in 1976 by the main Communist party publishing house.3 Perhaps writing about this matter in 1976 was prevented under the need for Soviet national secrecy. Nevertheless, it was a new technological operation at that time. As just noted, the Minister of Defense himself rewarded the author of the innovation.
But 20 years after the ASTP, a special jubilee edition of the book was published by RSC Energia.4 Many ASTP participants at that time were still alive and were working in the company. At this point the Soviet Union had been gone for five years, and it had become trendy to disclose Soviet secrets. But in this publication4 there is not a single word about kerosene cooling for the ASTP Soyuz rocket.
After a further seven years a very detailed memoir of a prominent participant in the Soviet part of the ASTP was published.5 This author even mentions small details such as an enjoyable lunch with the Americans. But still nothing about the unique procedure of kerosene cooling in 1975.
But then something happened 28 years after the event. The chief engineer of the cosmodrome told us the story of the kerosene cooling on that very hot July day in 1975. Although Major-General V.F. Popov is now in retirement, he is used to keeping his mouth shut. But even he had decided that after all these years the secrecy of the special operation Kerosene was now just water under the bridge.
Nevertheless, the designers still remain silent on this matter. A reasonable conclusion is that the engineers did not know that the Soyuz 19 would launch on July 15, 1975 with an additional cargo of approximately 200 kg.
The cover story of this covert operation is that
the industry was unable to build a cooler within three months
Of course the competence of V.F. Popov did not include knowledge of the space industry capabilities. Most likely, he just repeated the words of those who gave him the order to cool the kerosene.
In fact the Soviet space industry at that time was at the highest level of its technical potential. Making a cooler was nothing compared to the complex task of creating a Lunokhod. The fact that the size of the cooler is just a little less than a railway cistern would not trouble them. Carrier rockets that the space industry manufactures would be a little larger in size. Such a production plant could also develop the required cooler. Each large plant had its own design department, and several engineers were sufficient to facilitate the construction of the cooler.
So then, for what reason did the authorities (giving such an unusual order) decide not to talk directly with one of the space industry production plants?
It is the author's opinion that the stewards of this classified operation did not want to commission any of the space equipment production plants with manufacturing the kerosene cooler. This is because they feared leakage of information, as well as leaks to the designers of the space equipment for the ASTP, and to specialists from the design organisation – the OKB-1. In such a case a leak would be highly likely.
The author proceeds from his own experience of working for many years on the design of new technology in experimental workshops. Developers and manufacturers cannot operate without close contact when reaching the production stage of experimental samples.
It is not enough to create drawings of a new product and hand them over to the manufacturer. Because it is inevitable that issues will occur that a developer simply cannot predict. For example, how to actually cast, stamp, or lathe cut a particular component. In each such case plant employees and developers jointly seek optimal solutions that will meet both the design of a product and the technological capabilities of a particular facility. At the same time, it is not uncommon for a developer to modify a design to match the limitations of the manufacturing technology.
The OKB-1 was the leading design organization in the USSR for everything related to space technology. In practice this meant a constant presence of the assigned OKB-1 employees at various space industry production plants.
Therefore, if the curators of a special operation wanted to undertake the process of kerosene cooling in secret, they could not give the space industry an assignment to make the cooler. A refrigerator the size of a railway cistern cannot be hidden. Any representatives of the OKB-1 present at a plant, would realise that the very requirement for a kerosene cooler would strongly indicate a payload increase of the rocket and, correspondingly, a planned increase in the weight of the craft.
Therefore, stating the industry's inability to quickly create a cooler was most likely a cover story created to ensure that the designers did not learn about the planned increase in the mass of the craft. Consequently, the task for creating the cooler was assigned directly to the cosmodrome. Keeping those in the know to an absolute minimum is the byword of secrecy.
These concealment measures were also applied at the launch site. "Kerosene was not cooled at the launch pad, but right at the warehouse of the chief of the Baikonur cosmodrome back areas."1 Engineers are not allowed at that location. They have nothing to do there. According to testimonies of space industry veterans, very strict compartmentalization was in effect at the cosmodrome. Whenever a rocket is refueled at the launch pad, it will be covered with frost formed from jets of cold air coming down from tanks with liquid oxygen (the temperature of liquid oxygen is approximately -180°C). Who among the uninitiated would ever guess that the kerosene tanks were actually filled with cooled kerosene?
Therefore, on the day of that Soyuz 19 launch, July 15, 1975, the rocket was ready to place into orbit a heavier, seven-ton spacecraft.
It's time for us to go visit the launch area.
ISBN: 978-1-898541-19-6
Aulis Publishers, September, 2018
English translation from the Russian by BigPhil
*Heat exchanger cooled with liquid nitrogen (A. Popov)
References
Internet links verified January 10, 2018
b. The same story was published in Aerospace Defense magazine No.5 (12) 2003
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