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My own take at "Apollo program does not stop"

Archibald

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As said in the tin. There is a simple POD for the lunar flights not to stop by 1972.

Back to November 1968, when Nixon was elected. As every president, he had a transition team and they wrote a report on the space program. The chairman was Charles H. Townes, who got the Nobel Prize in 1966 for the invention of the laser (so he was hardly an idiot !)
Townes happened to be a die-hard supporter of manned spaceflight.
He handled the report to Nixon on January 13 1969. And he pushed for continuing lunar missions, no shuttle, no big space station, no NERVA nuclear rocket to Mars.

Unfortunately (OTL) NASA shot itself in the foot, and got a bad space shuttle design, and nothing else. Paine was the Spiro Agnew of NASA (except he was not a crook)

ITTL Paine is not NASA administrator, but more importantly, Nixon decides the Townes report is good enough and will follow it. As he wants to cut NASA budget to less than $5 billion annually, he request them to fly only two Apollo per year. And he defers plans for a lunar base to an eventual successor. After that he does not care.

The neat thing with the Townes report is the date it was published. As of January 1969 Saturn V production line is stopped (since July 1968) but not dismantled yet (OTL it happened in February 1970)

Then Apollo 13 push the remaining missions well into 1975. If Watergate happens as per OTL and Ford become President, it is good news, as Ford was a sincere supporter of spaceflight - he was in the task force that created NASA in 1958. Then with a little luck, butterflies prevent Carter and Mondale from being elected. Either Ford or Reagan keep supporting Apollo (Reagan would love that, really, in place of SDI).
 
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In the immediate term, all of the J-class missions would be flown (that is, the ones with the rover and other goodies). They would be Apollo 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20.
Two other missions would be only orbiters, no LM. First, the i-class missions were to go into lunar polar orbit and search for water and ice at the poles, using this
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_17/experiments/lse/

The radar could "see" deep into the lunar underground (1 miles !) and search for big lava tubes where a lunar base could be build.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/lava-tubes-moon-colony.htm
 
The other orbital mission (let's call it K-class) would be even more awesome, in fact it was straight out of James Bond movie (think Moonraker, but far better, and for real)
http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/UPWARD.html

Project UPWARD

To make a long story short (or trying to do so !)

... since 1962 (after the U-2 boondoggle of 1960) the U.S Government had spy satellites taking pictures of the Soviet Union from above. Details as small as a 4 inch (10 cm) could be seen. Through the atmosphere, from a height of 100 miles. Unbelievable.

When searching Apollo future landing sites, NASA needed to watch for any boulder bigger than 10 inch, which could be dangerous for the Lunar Module and its crew. NASA was just unable to achieve such results.
So they asked the NRO for their best spying camera, and the NRO accepted - at the height of the Cold War, with an extremely advanced - and deeply classified military technology ! And the spy satellite agency - the NRO - gave NASA four of its most advanced satellites, they cynically called Key Hole.
The plan was as follow.
The spysat was big and heavy, not as big as a Lunar Module, but too big for both to be carried. So screw the LM, and the spysat would be carried in its place aboard the Saturn V "below" the CSM. After what, its usual Apollo business: lunar orbit, with the spysat on the Apollo "nose" in place of the LM.
All that without digital camera: just plain old film. So at the end of the mission, a suited astronaut get out of the Apollo, crawls into the spysat, recover all the rolls of film, and bring them into the Apollo. After what they jettison the spysat into deep space, and go back to Earth.
 
The next step: an underground lunar base at the Marius Hills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marius_Hills

What is really interesting with the Marius Hills is that it was the backup landing site for Apollo 15. In fact the scientists were completely unable to chose between Hadley and Marius, they loved both very much, and it fell to Apollo 15 commander David Scott. Scott answer was "I can land at both, but I prefer Hadley" so Hadley it was. Marius Hills remained very high on the list and may very well have been picked up for Apollo 18, 19 or 20.

Fast forward to 2012.

Snapping pictures of the same area - the Marius Hills - the Japanese probe Kagyua found a big underground lava tube with a collapsed roof. LRO got more detailed pictures. Now imagine if either Apollo 15 or Apollo 19 had known about this: the astronauts could at least have travelled to the opening and get a glance.

...

Here is a possible scenario.

Apollo 19 will go to the Marius Hills. As usual, NASA search for a good landing spot, using Lunar Orbiter imagery. Next step is Apollo 18: with the Pancam set in the SIM Bay, it gets more pictures of the area. And they find the "opening" of the lava tube. To get even more details, they use the NRO spysat I mentionned, with the ALSE SAR system in the SIM bay. The ALSE confirms the underground lava tube is enormous.

With all that imagery, Apollo 19 landing spot is moved closer from the lava tube. The crew will travel to it with the Lunar Rover.
The mission is a stunning success and get such impact, the President remember the Townes report and decides to get a lunar base (in pace of the ISS) in the 80's.

As for the Soviets, they are already working on a much improved lunar lander: the L3M. http://www.astronautix.com/l/l3m.html

What I can't find (and it really piss me off !) is the distance between Apollo 15 planned landing site of 1971 and the lava tube opening found in 2010. I wonder if the LRV could travel the distance. Or maybe a soviet Lunokhod - boy, that would be awesome. I need to find some kind of google maps, but for the Moon.

Marius_crater_hills_2213_med.jpg

(the Marius Hills, picture by Lunar Orbiter 2 in 1966)
 
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What I can't find (and it really piss me off !) is the distance between Apollo 15 planned landing site of 1971 and the lava tube opening found in 2010. I wonder if the LRV could travel the distance. Or maybe a soviet Lunokhod - boy, that would be awesome. I need to find some kind of google maps, but for the Moon.

Google Earth has a Moon variant, but I don't think it's detailed enough really.
 
Thank you. I've managed to track down their coordinates

A bellcomm document from 1968 mentions 13°45 N 56°W for Apollo.

While the "skylight" (ain't that a cool name ?) coordinates are 303.230 and 14.091, and there I don't understand. While 14 is close enough from 13.45, I suppose 303 must be east, not west, and since the Moon is a globe, should be 57 degree in the opposite direction. Hence (how exciting !) they seem to be quite close from each other. I'm gonna ask to the eggheads and space nerds at Nasaspaceflight.com :p
 
Yowza, it did not took long. Alex, you were right, Google moon had the answer. I never used that thing, to be honest, or maybe I tried and failed.

Our beloved E of pi got the answer pretty fast

Google Earth's Moon feature seems to plot it out okay. The distance between 14.091 N 303.230 E and 13°45 N 56° W measures to be 24.75 km.

My reaction:



Whooooooooooohoooooooooo !!!

it is pretty close, close enough a LRV might do it.
 
So let's develops this a little further. While they are not perfect, lunar lava tubes have a lot of interesting features compared to the surface. Temperature is very stable, for a start; and of course radiation is stopped by rocks.

What would really be awesome would be to build the underground lunar base with inflatable modules (like the Bigelow 330 and 2100). The combination of the lava tube and inflatable modules could be a real winner.

Bigelow 330 mean a single module is 330 cubic feet in volume. 2100 mean the same; the internal volume is huge. Then the lunar lava tubes by themselves are huge: perhaps mile wide. Just imagine the number of inflatable modules that could be chained together into such a big volume. It just boggles the mind.
Well, at the end of the day one could build a lunar base quite similar to 2001's Clavius. Or even better, since Clavius was dug into the lunar rock, and Clarke note that was expensive, so Clavius living quarters are spartians. The really cool thing with the lunar lava tube is that, well, you don't even need to dig anything - at least you only need to clear the most dangerous rocks before expanding the inflatable modules.

It would be completely awesome. Just think about it. I intend to use that concept as a grand finale for my own TL.
 
It's a fantastic idea yes, and the discovery of an underground area would certainly lead to more investigation of permanent bases.
 
Little summary of the whole thing

- 1 Nixon decides to go with the Townes report, 1969
- 2 Apollo is cut to two flights a year, which alleviate fears of another Apollo 13 (more time to checkout)
- 3 Apollo 18 - 19 - 20 are not cancelled, one of the three goes to the Marius Hills
- 4 the landing zone is thoroughly mapped through Lunar Orbiter / PanCam / LMSS imagery, and ALSE radar
- 5 the underground lava tube is found and triggers huge and renewed interest for Apollo (and Nixon needs something to distract from the growing Watergate fiasco)
- 6 Apollo 19 lands not too far away and makes a limited investigation of the "Skylight" (that is the collapsed roof, the opening of the hole)
- 7 the Soviet react and in May 1972 Mishin get the L3M going,and the CIA hear about it
- 8 as a result, NASA gets a lunar base made of inflatable modules inside the Marius Hills lava tube
- 9 as the next logical step beyond Apollo - Soyuz (ASTP) joint exploration of the Moon become an objective in the 80's...

I'm tracking down the exact location of Apollo Marius Hills landing site. I found a bunch of 1968-69 technical papers. Looks like they plotted exploration of the place in detail. What is really cool is that the two geologists who did that (named Mc Cauley and Karlstrom) lived very long (they died in the 2010's) so their knowledge is available either in the Apollo days or many decades later, if a lunar return ever happens.

The more I research the Marius Hills, the more I like the place for a lunar base.
 
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