Re: NASA HONORS LEGENDARY ASTRONAUT VANCE BRAND


"OM" <om@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
> ...For that flight and it's effects on the Cold War, he deserves just
> as much of a legend status as Tom Stafford and Deke Slayton. Period.
>

What effect on the Cold War?

I draw your attention back to:


The Space Review: The real lessons of international cooperation in space

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/413/1

by James Oberg // Monday, July 18, 2005

Significant anniversaries bring out veterans of the past events to
reminisce and celebrate, and last week was no exception, especially with
space news attracting so much attention. The thirtieth anniversary of the
Apollo-Soyuz space linkup (July 17, 1975) and the tenth anniversary of the
first shuttle-Mir docking (the shuttle landed on July 7, 1995) were fitting
calendar marks to contemplate the significance of those events and their
legacy for today's International Space Station.
With the US-Russian space partnership at the heart of current human
space activities, both the general public and space professionals are giving
a lot of thought to an architecture for partnership on future American space
missions beyond Earth orbit, out towards the Moon and Mars. Here, a good
grasp of the historical basis of such policies is essential.
However, just as it can be frustrating and misleading to try to
reconstruct World War 2 history from stories told at an American Legion
picnic, so too should caution be exercised in giving much credence to
celebratory boasts and grand advisories that have been coming out of the
current celebrations. Certainly the public can celebrate the courage and
skill of the men who carried out the first international space docking, and
can admire the warm personal relationships that sprang up and have endured.
But that's as far as reality extends: beyond that, it's all just fancy talk.
All veterans of life-threatening experiences-in the military, in
emergency response, in law enforcement, and especially in space-deserve a
life-long "blank check" for narrative license whenever they want to recount
the way that they enjoy remembering their accomplishments. They deserve
access to any podiums-and to any journalists-to express their opinions. They
just don't deserve automatic credibility and honorary expertise in topics
beyond their immediate experience base.
Examples abound from last week's celebration of Apollo-Soyuz at the
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, where the two Russian
cosmonauts-Aleksey Leonov and Valeriy Kubasov-met with the two surviving
members of the Apollo crew, Thomas Stafford and Vance Brand. The third
Apollo crewman, Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton, had died in 1993.
"It was the very heights of the Cold War," Stafford recalled, "with
thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each country." Then from outer space a
streak of sanity appeared: "Yet both superpowers had great accomplishments
in space, so we decided to work together." On the dais, his opposite number
on the Soviet side, Leonov, nodded amiably.
However, history paints a far different picture, and Leonov, especially,
knew it. The Soviet space program was in shambles, its drive to land men on
the Moon literally in ruins and rubble (Leonov was to have been the
commander of that mission). Its backup plan to regain the lead in the "Space
Race" was to build a small orbiting space station, but linkups failed and
one space crew died (Leonov was supposed to have gone on that flight but a
medical problem led to the dispatch of his backup crew). Two subsequent
space stations were launched but crashed to Earth, and Leonov had trained to
command them both. His subsequent assignment to the space linkup was a
consolation prize.
Only with the Soviet program at a standstill did Moscow agree to fly a
joint orbital mission. Its fallback position was that if it couldn't be
Number One in space, it could at least pose as the equal partner of the new
Number One, the United States. It was better than letting on how far behind
its space program had fallen.
Space history in a vacuum -- Some of the revisionist history touted at
these celebrations wasn't nearly as benign. At the NASM, Vance Brand
delicately described the cautious first meetings when "we'd all heard a lot
of bad things about the other country". Brand wasn't so rude as to elaborate
that the "bad things" Americans had heard about the USSR were mostly true
and the "bad things" the Soviet public had been fed about the West were
mostly propagandistic lies. But, Brand continued, since the cosmonauts were
easy to get along with, "any concerns went away." As pilots they were able
to ignore politics, they all agreed.
This "political neutrality" was made easier, sadly, by the space pilots
deciding to simply see the Cold War as a turf battle between competing but
ultimately indistinguishable clans. For example, Stafford recently reduced
the conflict between the free nations of the West and the totalitarian
regimes of the Soviet bloc as "two superpowers with a somewhat adversarial
relationship."

This echoed a passage in a recently-published official NASA history of
the 1995-1997 Shuttle-Mir program (written by an astronaut's spouse, not a
real historian) which explained the Cold War began with the US and the USSR
becoming "competitors in many areas". It then developed into "a situation
similar to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with its 'two households, both
alike in dignity' yet sharing an 'ancient grudge'." There weren't any "good
guys" or "bad guys" in this unearthly view of earth history.
This may be the way it looks from outer space, and may be the way it has
to be seen for the sake of US-Russian space partnerships, but it's not a
reality-based conclusion. If Earthside history teaches anything, it is that
Moscow was indeed the capital of an "evil empire" and the world is far
better off that the Soviet regime wound up on the "ash heap of history", in
the then-controversial words of President Reagan. The American astronauts
probably knew it, but they also-probably rightly-knew they couldn't speak
the truth then, or now, for the sake of the mission. That was except for one
loose-tongued backup cosmonaut who expressed his unconventional opinions a
little too freely, and wound up bounced from the cosmonaut program.
Grand gestures -- If the Cold War was no more than a global gang war by
two morally equivalent forces, then from the point of view of the
Apollo-Soyuz team the solution to the conflict can be equally fantastical:
teach the rest of the world by their example how they can all "just get
along" as well as the spacemen did.
That's the way the NASM's press release portrayed it: "Thirty years ago
in July, a new era of international cooperation began when the world's two
space powers shook hands in space." One typical press account of the events,
datelined Cape Canaveral, stated that "the project advanced space
exploration and improved Cold War relations between the two countries."

Leonov put it this way: "We were to show the world that Russians and
Americans can work together, and what is most important-they can create a
common rescue system so that any spacecraft could be rescued in space." His
spaceshipmate Kubasov concurred: "It laid the foundations for further
cooperation in space between the two countries."

NASA's chief astronaut during the Shuttle-Mir program in the mid-1990s,
Charles Precourt, was even more enthusiastic about the practical benefit of
space friendship. It will, he wrote for a NASA history book on the project,
"provide the psychological impetus for politicians to force themselves to
find an agreement to disputes that otherwise they wouldn't." This will
happen, he believes, "because they'll look up there and say, 'Well, we have
an investment in that, too. We have to keep this relationship going in a
proper direction,' rather than doing something rash."

Again, this planet's historical record is inconsistent with this
interpretation, which seems to place the international space flights in the
role of the cause, rather than the consequence, of improved international
relations. ASTP could happen because it symbolized the success of Nixon's
policy of detente with the USSR (the policy came first). However, subsequent
joint space projects were cancelled in the late 1970s by President Jimmy
Carter (the man who had earlier warned about having "an inordinate fear of
communism") in response to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and Africa.
The cooperation resumed only as the USSR was collapsing in the early
1990s. Shuttle-Mir and the critical role of Russia in the International
Space Station were enabled by the rise of a freer, more democratic Russian
society, not by inertia from decades-old space handshakes.
Even if Apollo-Soyuz had never happened, Shuttle-Mir (in some form)
would have become possible in the political context of the early 1990s, and
both countries' space teams would have found a way to proceed to the space
dockings with little additional effort, even without any historical
precedents. Alternately, with Apollo-Soyuz as historical fact, a surviving
Soviet regime-with its political repressions, imperialistic client states,
massive nuclear and conventional strike forces, and soul-killing society of
deception-would never have been given veto power over the centerpiece of
Western human space flight, the space station.
So where does this leave the space handshakers? Well, like the robin who
may think its song ushers in the spring, or the rooster who thinks he
commands the sun to rise, a lot of spacemen in Russian and in America enjoy
recalling their roles-honorable ones, to be sure-in carrying out such a
mission. If they want to think their flight caused the international thaws
rather than merely reflected them, they've earned the right to their point
of view-just as sober historians, practical politicians, and sensible space
buffs have the right to gently refuse to believe them.
Shaky basis for future choices -- So this "space handshake diplomacy" is
a very unreliable basis for advocating future space policy. "I am convinced
that all future flights will be international," Leonov said at the NASM.
Stafford agreed that international efforts are needed for the return to the
Moon and making several expeditions to Mars. But why should merely saying so
make it true?

The future role of international partners in American projects under
development is only now being assessed, and a cold-blooded assessment of
costs versus benefits needs to be made, independent of feel-good boasts from
space pilots. Partnerships do seem to give projects political (and
budgetary) credibility within each nation, and they do force open windows of
contacts so that countries don't succumb to fearful misinterpretations of
each other's intentions and capabilities.
Teaming arrangements have given some nations critical supporting roles
on the major programs in the US and Russia, and one of the best examples are
the robot arms supplied to the space shuttle and to the ISS by Canada.
European equipment has significantly enhanced scientific benefits from
shuttle flights.
But for the biggest promises often touted for the "grand alliance" of
the US and Russia, the scorecard is much less clear-cut. Having the Russians
along was supposed to make the project cheaper, but it cost more to build
the proper international interfaces. Launching all components into a
northerly orbit accessible from Russia increased the space transportation
cost by billions of dollars.
Nor did the Russian presence make the project faster, better, or safer,
as it turned out. NASA was supposed to "learn from the immense body of
Russian experience", but it seems they never did-they just flew their
missions and learned the necessary lessons directly. Repeated inquiries to
NASA to specify things that had been learned exclusively from Russian
experience have resulted in a pitiful short list of trivial "lessons".
It can even be argued that the most important lessons learned were
harmful. On Shuttle-Mir, NASA watched space crews dodge death on almost a
monthly basis and may have subconsciously absorbed the lesson that since
nobody had actually died, you could get sloppy with safety reviews and it
wouldn't ever bite you. They should have known better-and for most of its
glorious history, NASA did know better-but the gradual degradation of NASA's
"safety culture" that led to the Columbia disaster was developing during the
same years as Shuttle-Mir missions were flying. Dodge enough bullets (as the
crew of Mir did in those days), they may have figured, and it proves you're
bulletproof forever.
As far as "not speaking about politics", that may be an acceptable rule
in the narrow theater of spacecraft operations, but it is not a technique
that can be generalized to apply to international partnerships as a whole.
There, national policy requires a relationship with moral law as well as
amoral "realpolitik". There are plenty of regimes that the US simply would
not partner with in the 1980s and 1990s, and for similar reasons, will not
partner with today.
Russia and the United States, and the world's other spacefaring nations,
will be conducting complex and challenging space missions in decades to
come. Some efforts will be in parallel, some will be united, and some will
be completely unrelated to each other. Strategists have a lot of information
to base their choices on, except for one type of useless advice: they should
smile when the old spacemen talk to them, and listen politely to their
opinions, and applaud them, and then disregard them as soon as they've left
the room.




James Oberg (www.jamesoberg.com) is a 22-year veteran of NASA mission
control. He is now a writer and consultant in Houston.





.

Relevant Pages

  • It s about Obama, not Georgia :)
    ... Kremlin dusts off Cold War lexicon to make US villain in Georgia ... Georgia: the conflict in South Ossetia was part of a plot by Dick ... old habits of Soviet years, in which a sinister American hand was held ... Russian Ambassador to the EU. ...
    (misc.survivalism)
  • Piss Poor Propaganda [Was: Re: A good documentary.]
    ... That the Russian opinion is given without any masking doesn't make ... I downloaded the movie this morning and watched some of it -- I suppose ... Please note that Gospodin Gilman demands the "liquidation" of Latvia, ... history. ...
    (soc.culture.baltics)
  • Re: Piss Poor Propaganda [Was: Re: A good documentary.]
    ... That the Russian opinion is given without any masking doesn't make ... I downloaded the movie this morning and watched some of it -- I suppose ... Please note that Gospodin Gilman demands the "liquidation" of Latvia, ... history. ...
    (soc.culture.baltics)
  • Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt
    ... Cold War International History Project Book Discussion ... Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian ... Associate Professor of History and International ... The 1956 Hungarian revolt, and its suppression by the Soviet Union, was ...
    (soc.culture.magyar)
  • Re: Killers opinions: Final Convictions of a Nazi
    ... After a big war, including antagonist coutries like USA and the URSS, ... And your recent history shows in a very cruel way, ... Stalin before the Russian revolution to put pressure on the oil refineries ... Germany interred Jews for the same reason American interred many Japanese ...
    (misc.legal)